In short

• Young people in the Global South face intersecting pressures from unemployment, poverty, climate change, education challenges and digitalisation.
• The u’GOOD!? conference in Dar es Salaam focused on youth wellbeing, strengthening collaboration, and generating interdisciplinary insights.
• Delegates highlighted the value of relational approaches that emphasise social justice, inclusion, diversity, and contextual relevance.
• Building communities of practice can strengthen youth-focused research and its impact.

In October 2025, the HSRC, in partnership with the National Research Foundation of South Africa, Fondation Botnar, and with support from the Tanzania Commission of Science and Technology, hosted the inaugural u’GOOD!? conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The three-day capacity-strengthening event brought together more than 100 researchers and partners from 9 Global South countries to deepen collaboration, enhance research and grant management capacity, generate interdisciplinary insights on youth wellbeing and build a community of practice grounded in relational wellbeing.

The u’GOOD!? research programme implementation team. Photo:-FLOW Communications

Young people in urban and peri-urban areas of the Global South face unprecedented challenges as they seek to find their place in society. High unemployment, poverty, climate change, poor-quality education and limited skills development shape their life chances. These pressures influence not only their material circumstances, but also their beliefs, relationships and interactions with environments, communities, institutions and support systems. 

u’GOOD!? is a multilateral, multi-partner and multi-year research initiative that creates space for researchers to contribute to meaningful change while amplifying young people’s voices. Spanning nine Global South countries, the programme funds projects that encourage researchers to adopt a relational wellbeing framework to better understand young people’s lives. It advances relational wellbeing theory and applies it to key global transformations, including climate change, digitalisation, livelihoods and mental health.  

The first u’GOOD!? annual conference, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, from 6–9 October 2025, marked a significant milestone in the programme’s capacity-building journey. It formed part of the programme’s broader effort to strengthen relational approaches to youth wellbeing, while generating empirical evidence on the urgent challenges facing young people in urban and peri-urban settings across the Global South.  

The event was organised by Prof. Sharlene Swartz, Dr Angelique Wildschut, and Dr Candice Groenewald of the HSRC; Dr Dorothy Ngila of the National Research Foundation (NRF); and the broader u’GOOD!? implementation team. It brought together more than 100 delegates, including researchers, funders, and members of the project’s advisory group, which included senior experts and youth collaborators. 

What made the conference unique? 

The u’GOOD!? programme is intentionally structured to foster collaboration, co-creation, shared learning and capacity strengthening. This orientation stems from the programme’s adoption of relational wellbeing as its overarching framework. 

According to the programme’s first Strategic Learning Brief (2025), relational wellbeing is operationalised at programme and project levels through the principles of relational thinking, relational gathering, and relational working. This approach requires sustained commitment to collective and collaborative practice, a systemic and social justice orientation, openness to adaptation and critique, and deliberate investment of time.  

The conference formed part of a multi-year capacity-strengthening effort that includes more than 20 webinars. It served not only to launch funded projects, but also to build momentum towards a Global South community of practice on relational wellbeing. 

All three planned conferences aim to include external stakeholders to enhance visibility and meaningful engagement between funded projects, youth and government stakeholders. This reflects the relational wellbeing premise that policymakers are integral to the research process. The conferences also provide platforms to build the capacity of emerging researchers by creating space for research teams and their postgraduate students to present work-in-progress, receive feedback, and engage with peers and stakeholders. Structured engagements facilitate peer learning and networking between project teams, young people and external stakeholders, strengthening the rigour and relevance of emerging findings. 

Global South collaboration across three days 

The conference convened 23 research projects and partners from Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Romania, South Africa, Tanzania, and Vietnam. The programme was strategically designed to strengthen capacities for relational thinking, working, and gathering through meaningful and skills-strengthening engagements.  

Teams were challenged to communicate their proposals through five-minute videos, podcasts or social media-style posts. This approach encouraged innovation in research communication while fostering shared principles about how relational research should be conducted. 

Alongside this innovation, the conceptual foundations of the work were rigorously debated. Anchored by a critical review of evidence on youth wellbeing at the intersection of climate change, digitalisation, livelihoods and mental health, the conference consolidated a shared conceptual architecture to guide the programme’s intended impact on youth wellbeing. 

Key learnings  

Participants affirmed that relational wellbeing complements material and subjective wellbeing by emphasising the quality of relationships, interdependence, and community connectedness. The “enemies” of relational wellbeing were identified as hyper-individualism, meritocracy, fragmentation, and digital disconnection. The emerging consensus was that relational wellbeing offers a framework for studying youth wellbeing beyond economic and psychological metrics, anchoring it instead in context, culture, and collective life.  

Young project advisory members of the u’GOOD!? research programme. Photo:-FLOW Communications 

Thematic insights also emerged: 

• Digitalisation: Young people must be positioned as “conscious architects” of their digital lives. Research into youth lives must navigate tensions between digital inclusion and digital exploitation. 

• Climate change: Strong intersections between climate impacts, mental health and livelihoods were highlighted, underscoring the need to examine how climate pressures shape youth participation and intersectional experiences. 

• Livelihoods: Livelihoods are co-created through networks and communities. Research must account for the time, relationships and strategies needed for young people to achieve success in pursuing sustainable pathways. 

• Mental health: Young people’s mental health is shaped by interlinked systemic pressures. Analysis must recognise how societal influences and exposures interact to support or undermine positive mental health outcomes. 

Conclusion 

The inaugural u’GOOD!? conference established a crucial framework and collaborative environment to advance this complex theoretical approach. By convening researchers, funders, and youth collaborators, it deepened the collective and conceptual understanding of relational wellbeing while laying the foundation for empirical advances in youth wellbeing research in the Global South.  

Beyond knowledge production, the programme seeks to shift research practice towards approaches that foreground social justice, inclusion, diversity, and contextual relevance in youth-focused research. It underscores the political and systemic nature of wellbeing, and the need for methodologies rooted in Global South philosophies.  

Programme resources, including the evidence review and strategic learning brief, provide guidance for scholars and practitioners interested in applying relational wellbeing both as an analytical framework for studying youth wellbeing and as a research practice in the Global South. 

Research contacts and acknowledgements 

This Review article was written by Dr Yoliswa Ntsepe, a research specialist in the HSRC Equitable Education and Economies (EEE) division and project manager of the u’GOOD?! research programme; Dr Angelique Wildschut, a research director in the HSRC; Prof. Sharlene Swartz, a divisional executive in the HSRC, Dr Candice Groenewald, chief research specialist in the HSRC, and Dr Dorothy Ngila, Director of Knowledge and Institutional Networks at the NRF. The article was based on the first u’GOOD!? conference hosted in October 2025.  

For more information about this work, please contact: Prof. Sharlene Swartz sswartz@hsrc.ac.za  

The HSRC hosted this event in collaboration with the National Research Foundation, FLOW Communications, the Tanzania Commission of Science and Technology and Fondation Botnar of Switzerland.