Senegal experienced rapid population growth and educational expansion in recent decades, while labour market prospects stagnated amid high informality. Growing cohorts of educated youth struggle to find work. The “High Hopes and Broken Promises” (HIBO) project combines the life course paradigm with epistemic disobedience discourse informed by Négritude, emphasising African diasporic awareness and agency. Our study amplifies young adults’ narratives of their life experiences, aspirations, and social-political engagement as they navigate social adulthood amid adverse economic conditions. We conducted three waves of semi-structured thematic interviews with biographical components with young adults born in Senegal between 1977 and 1997 in early 2021, late 2021, and 2024. Data collection occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic and youth protests against President Macky Sall’s unconstitutional third-term attempt. This paper describes the motivation, study design, and data collection, summarising challenges and opportunities encountered by an international research team producing decolonial knowledge on respondents’ life courses.