Youth Transforming Social Structures in their Communities in Honduras

• In Event: Meaningfully engaging youth in fragile environments

Abstract

Honduras holds a population of 8.2 million, with more than a third below the age of 18. Despite progress in terms of opportunities for youth, there remain many social inequity challenges impacting this demographic, a situation accentuated in rural and peri-urban areas.

CARE Honduras has developed an empowerment and leadership model for youth under the framework of access to basic education. This model facilitates the involvement of youth to lead action research processes at the community level and to define strategic solutions to problems in education, income, preventive health, culture and peace, through extracurricular activities with an outlook at civic action and the exercise of rights.

With these actions organized youth have reincorporated more than 300 youth boys and girls per year in processes culminating in basic education, as well as the organization of structures for youth to defend their rights, recognizing municipal authorities at local and national level.

These processes have also helped to repair the social fabric in communities in order to generate transformational change that translates into improved opportunities for youth, developed from within the communities themselves and with the leadership of youth as actors in their own development.

Author

• Edgar Dominguez Roque, CARE Honduras