Innovative Reform: Promoting Positive Youth Development in Senegal

• In Event: Adolescent learning and positive youth development: Missing links in secondary education reform

Abstract

This paper examines the case of FHI 360's Education de Base (EDB) project to highlight the project as an example of an educational innovation rooted in the positive youth development framework that promotes effective adolescent learning approaches and can be implemented and sustained in resource-constrained schools in developing nations. EDB was a five-year educational reform project in Senegal (2008-2013) that aimed to modernize and improve lower secondary schools, and is the largest USAID-funded project dedicated specifically to lower secondary schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with a broad range of stakeholders a year after the closure of the project, this paper investigates the elements of the program that build on positive youth development including student government, a competency-based curriculum, world of work activities, information and communications technology, and observatories of vulnerable children. That paper also identifies those factors and mechanisms that have encouraged institutionalization and the barriers to sustainability.

Author

• Elizabeth Buckner, FHI 360