Dictionary Series: What do we mean when we talk about Youth Participation?
#WorldChildrensDay
Participation is much more than having a voice. It is about being informed, engaged and having an influence in decisions and matters.
What do we mean when we talk about youth participation?
Youth Participation is one of the key steps in our Responsible Innovation framework, and is something we have been working on for a while at the Collaborative! Given that our goal is to use data to improve outcomes for children, it is really important for us to ensure that children and young people are given the opportunity to contribute to the projects that aim to make a difference to their lives.
But before we could start thinking about how to do it, we needed to work out exactly what we meant when we were talking about youth participation.
Let’s break it down.
Youth
As defined by UNICEF, youth refers to anyone aged between 15-24 years. Child refers to anyone under the age of 18 years. That’s fairly straightforward.
Participation
Participation comes in many forms, styles and approaches. So how can we settle on a solid definition for what it means in our context?
Youth Participation
In its most basic form, youth participation is when young people, individually and/or collectively, form and express their views and influence matters that concern them directly and indirectly.
After a number of interesting discussions with experts and young people, we realised that what is most important for us at the Collaborative is that any participation is meaningful - for both the young people involved but also for the project team.
Meaningful Participation
This is when adolescents have an appropriate space to form an opinion; when they can voice such opinions; have an audience which listens to them and eventually influence decisions. The Lundy Model gives further information on this.
In order for participation to be meaningful, it needs to be designed via an equity approach.
Equity Approach
Designing and implementing programmes so that all young people, especially the most vulnerable, have an opportunity to express their voice and influence matters that are important to them.
How do I know if it’s right for my project?
There is no one size fits all approach to youth participation. Each project will have it’s own unique requirements, and sometimes there may be no need for youth participation. That’s okay too!
Our workbook helps us to decide if youth participation is appropriate for a project by helping a team develop a why statement. A why statement is clear guiding principle to steer our youth engagement strategy across our projects and operations. It helps us to pursue valuable interactions with children and young people that have a clear purpose.
The Collaborative’s why statement is as follows:
The Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF seeks to engage young people because we believe that, in order to improve outcomes for young people, you must involve them in the solutions.
Engaging with children and young people will help us:
help us to ensure that the outputs of our work are appropriate
hold us accountable across our activities
help us shape the future goals, targets and ambitions
There is no exact science to youth participation - and no one right way to carry it out. Working to develop a why statement has been a useful exercise in allowing teams to work through and rationalise how young people could add value, and gain value, from being involved in a project. It also provides a useful discussion point to explore various youth participation options, rather than leaving a closed ‘yes’ or ‘no ‘ answer.
Having an overarching reason why to engage with young people is very helpful in starting to decide how best to include them in the project. Like with any piece of work, a clearly defined statement is fundamental in achieving your goal.
What type of participation is best?
There’s no one right method for youth participation, and the same methods won’t be applicable for every project every time.
Engaging with young people can be helpful for different reasons. Perhaps they will be able to provide valuable contextual information to your project, or test out and feedback on a tool or product you have developed. Sometimes, it might be useful to engage with young people to help design your project right from the beginning!
Our workbook highlights two key requirements that it can be useful to track your project against:
Design and delivery
This focuses on a need for youth participation to aid, advise and influence the design and delivery or a project. For example, how an output or a tool will be used
Context and experience
This focuses on a need for youth participation to provide specific knowledge and context of a topic. For example, lived experience of being at school in a specific region
Using our participation matrix, which details a variety of methods of youth participation, we can then discuss with the team what their needs are and which types of engagement may be most useful. Importantly, we take time to reflect on what young people will gain from any particular involvement. For example, having young people sit in on a high-level board meeting that hasn’t been tailored to their needs probably won’t be insightful, or engaging, for either party!
It’s also important to remember that in certain circumstances, youth participation may not be appropriate. Forcing youth participation into a project just to say that you’ve done it isn’t valuable for anyone involved.
I want to learn more! Where do I start?
You can find out more about our youth participation workbook here.
UNICEF also have a great resource, Engaged and Heard, to find out more detail about different methods and approaches.
If you want to get in touch directly about anything discussed in this article, or just want to find out more, you can email us here.