At YouthNet, we have a two-pronged approach to youth participation. First, we made a decision that youth participation is a "right", and a "responsibility" for both adult professionals and the young people involved in our programs. We hope that it will lead to better program outcomes and we continue to look for evidence in this area.
Most importantly, we believe that programmatic and professional experiences are enriched by the inclusion of young people in most aspects of programs and continue to use what we learned from our collaborations to improve our programs. In addition, young people continue to inform us that they have enjoyed collaborating with us and that they have grown in terms of programmatic, technical and interpersonal skills have informed us.
The key areas that reflect YouthNet's commitment to youth participation include:
The Barcelona and Bangkok YouthForce
YouthNet, along with several other international AIDS organizations, sponsored both the Barcelona and Bangkok YouthForce, an international network of youth activists and adult allies attending the 2002 and 2004 International AIDS Conferences. The goals of the YouthForce were to ensure that youth technical and programmatic issues were on the meeting agendas, and to encourage HIV/AIDS organizations to involve youth and work closely with them to ensure partnerships in design, implementation and evaluation of programs and policies.
In 2004, at Bangkok, a two-day pre-conference workshop trained 130+ young people in various technical areas to help them better participate in the science of the conference and to teach them skills for reaching out and offering themselves as resources to global leaders and key persons from their countries.
Youth Participation Guide
The objective of the Youth Participation Guide is to increase the level of meaningful youth participation in reproductive health (RH) and HIV/AIDS programming at an institutional and organizational level. The Youth Participation Guide includes a conceptual overview, an assessment and planning tool, and a two-day youth-adult partnership training curriculum. These tools foster individual and institutional commitment to involving youth in meaningful ways.
The goal is that this Guide be used for other organizations interested in building their own capacity for youth participation and youth-adult partnerships. To date, YouthNet has conducted three training of trainers workshops on the Guide, in Namibia (for ten Southern Africa Countries), Tanzania (for local implementing partners), and Zambia (for IYF's Empowering Africa's Young People Initiative).
Interagency Working Group
As a part of its global technical leadership role, YouthNet has convened an interagency working group to discuss issues of youth involvement. This group of staff from cooperating agencies and partners meet on a regular basis to share and disseminate experiences and lessons learned in youth involvement. The working group is set to serve a strategic role in building consensus for future directions in the area youth involvement. More specifically, YouthNet and WHO have teamed up to begin the initial steps for developing a framework for measuring the impact of youth participation. During a meeting in November, a diverse international group of experts met to identify indicators and discuss research gaps in youth participation.
Country Programs and Technical Assistance
YouthNet involves local youth consultants as full team members during country assessment trips. In the Tanzania program, a youth participation coordinator has been hired and a youth executive committee established to ensure the integration of youth participation in programs there. YouthNet also involves youth in its work in Namibia. For both programs in Tanzania and Namibia, YouthNet plans to develop and implement in-country internship programs based on its model at YouthNet headquarters in Arlington, VA.
Technical Advisory Group
In total, eight young people have been part of the fifteen member technical advisory group for YouthNet. Additionally, YouthNet plans to ensure that 25 percent of the country advisory groups be filled by youth. In this way, youth voices can be represented in all country offices. In enhancing the quality of their participation in the TAG, YouthNet staff work with the youth members by providing them with adequate knowledge about RH and HIV/AIDS issues so that they are better poised to make valuable contributions to the discussions on the design and implementation of youth RH services and HIV/AIDS prevention programs.
