“How to Live a Good Life”

This article provides an ethnographically informed critique of the humanitarian self-management model that informs reproductive health trainings for young urban refugees in Kampala, Uganda. It draws on interviews with 16 adolescent refugees, as well policymakers, aid workers and care professionals Kampala April 2019. We found education training sessions are a site gendered learning where displaced boys girls gain understanding what it means “how to live good life” how become marriage material. Their focus self-control also reflects wider shift humanitarianism toward female empowerment tool neoliberal governance. In low-resource context, however, “self-managing” one’s takes different meaning, adolescents weigh up opportunities short-term income from transactional sex imagined futures elsewhere.