Acculturation and immigrant African adolescents’ experiences of education in the diaspora

Even though adolescents face challenges in adapting to the new environment in the diaspora, a lot of research focuses on adults, and the other partly deals with children left behind in heritage countries. Very minimal research focuses on children and adolescents in the diaspora, especially regarding the challenges they face in their psychosocial life and academic pursuits. This chapter adopted a qualitative research paradigm to investigate the acculturation experiences affecting adolescents’ psychological and academic life both within the African and European contexts, in particular, Zimbabwean adolescents in the African diaspora, in Botswana and African adolescents in the European diaspora, in the United Kingdom. Findings show that adolescents in both the African and European diaspora suffer varied acculturation challenges which negatively impact their psychosocial and academic life in several ways.