Youth at the Centre: Youth-led Accountability and Advocacy in Education for Sustainability: Promising Practices from Honduras, Nepal, Rwanda and Zimbabwe

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Putting youth at the center of youth development: Lessons learned from youth engagement

Proposal

Today’s 1.8 billion adolescents and youth make up a quarter of the world’s population. Africa has the fastest growing and most youthful population in the world with 40 percent under the age of fifteen and about 20 percent between the ages of fifteen and twenty four. In 2015, heads of state and government adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a world-wide commitment to eradicate poverty and achieve sustainable development goals whilst ensuring that no one is left behind. In particular, Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning. Whilst progress has been made in engaging youth in shaping development efforts and challenging harmful norms and values, many young people are still unable to access the opportunities they require to achieve their dreams albeit global policy frameworks, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, provide for the right of young people to participate in decision making that affects their lives. How can the global education agenda leverage this “demographic dividend” to reflect the needs and interests of young people, and how can youth exercise both voice and agency to drive sustainable development? What skills do they need to meaningfully contribute to the social and economic development of their respective communities and to challenge perceptions about their ability and right to contribute?

Since 2003, CARE has implemented the Patsy Collins Trust Fund Initiative (PCTFI) to improve the quality of education for marginalized adolescents and youth in 18 countries. Now in its third Cohort, PCTFI has been testing an innovative mix of approaches aimed at enabling young people to gain a sense of power and independence over their own lives in alignment with CARE’s Education Strategy and CARE’s 2020 Program Strategy which both highlight advocacy and accountability as important vehicles for achieving positive and lasting change.
Under PCTFI young people are at the center of social change as they become equipped with and utilize the skills and competencies at the agency, relations and structural levels to influence the creation, adoption and/or implementation of youth-friendly policies through Youth-led Advocacy. Youth-led advocacy has the potential to bring lasting change to young people’s lives through five inter-connected elements: shared goal, strong youth leaders equipped with critical skills, effective partnerships, grassroots support, and evidence of sustained action. Through the Community (Participatory) Score Card (CSC) approach under PCTFI, CARE brings together youth, parents, teachers, school administrators, local government officials and other service providers to jointly analyze problems and find common and shared solutions. It is a proven citizen-driven approach to increase participation, accountability, and transparency between communities and decision makers.
This paper will highlight lessons from intersectional approaches to youth-led accountability and advocacy adapted in Honduras, Nepal, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. These approaches aim at building up youth voices and agency while expanding spaces for collective action and shifting power dynamics at various levels.
• Under PCTFI Cohort 1, CARE implemented the RENACER project in two regions of Honduras (one peri-urban, one rural) by engaging youth to turn around their communities riddled by gang violence, extreme poverty, high rates of teenage pregnancy, and poor education outcomes. Young people underwent training and then conducted a community census to gain greater understanding of the challenges facing youth. Throughout the project, youth continued to use Participatory Action Research (PAR) tools, including conducting risk assessments, developing risk maps and catalyzing communal action planning to address local risks. Youth leaders assisted in establishing a government-approved accelerated learning program identifying learning centers in their neighborhoods, finding the facilitators and spaces for classes, and motivating their out-of-school peers to enroll in the program.
• Under PCTFI Cohort 3, CARE has combined accelerated learning, life skills training and peer support networks in order ensure that older girls from marginalized castes and Muslim communities in Nepal are able to complete a basic cycle of education, acquire skills for employment and entrepreneurship and develop the leadership competencies to challenge social norms. Adolescent girls have conducted Participatory Action Research to gather and analyze evidence to engage policy makers on safety and security issues which affect their education including gender-based violence and early marriage and to recommend specific action steps to address these challenges. In Rwanda and Zimbabwe, CARE is working with boys and girls through interventions designed to boost adolescent leadership and create spaces for collective action. Both countries have adapted youth-led social accountability approaches (using CARE’s CSC) to bring together teachers, parents, and local leadership in addressing barriers to quality education. For example, girls in Zimbabwe successfully advocated for access to and disposal of menstrual hygiene kits in schools, thus reducing days missed. This year (2018-2019) in Rwanda the CSC will be rolled out in 174 schools, giving girls and boys a unique opportunity to aggregate their voice and demand changes from regional and national actors.

The paper will also highlight gaps in our knowledge and evidence of what works best to support youth-led efforts. In addition, the paper will challenge the readiness of the architecture of global education platforms such as CIES to embrace youth engagement and participation in pursuance of sustainable development outcomes.

Authors

• Katherine Begley, CARE USA

• Ellen Chigwanda, CARE USA Education Team

• Etobssie Wako, CARE USA