Iyeyinka Kusi-Mensah is the Lead Postdoctoral research fellow on the Advancing Resiliency in Self-Employed young Women in Nigeria (ARISE&WIN) project. The ARISE&WIN project is focused on co-producing solutions to enhance the resilience and wellbeing of self-employed young women. She is also currently rounding up her PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and is an Associate Lecturer at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (C-CAMH), University of Ibadan, Nigeria where she teaches courses on literature review writing and ethnography.

She completed her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude with highest honours and Phi Beta Kappa in Social Anthropology and African Studies at Harvard University in 2016 with a citation in French. She obtained an MPhil in Political and Economic Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 2019.

She is interested in youth employment issues in Africa and is passionate about helping to create an environment where Africa youth can have dignified and fulfilling work. Her doctoral thesis aims to map the social network landscape of self-employed youth in Ghana and Nigeria and look at how their social networks affect the quality of their work. Her methodological strengths are ethnography, qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research.