Health is a cross-cutting state of wellbeing that touches on many aspects of life. In turn, there are many aspects that influence one’s health, especially the health of young people. Education—including access to and participation in school—greatly correlates with youth health, as does how youth are able to secure the necessities for their own lives. Each day, more youth have access to technology—including mobiles and access to the internet—which opens new opportunities but along with it, new challenges. Gender norms influence youth differentially and they play a large role on key outcome for youth.
We know from evidence that programs influencing multiple sector outcomes are more likely to be impactful for young people. To be successful, programmers and policymakers should therefore consider how different aspects of other sectors influence health, and how health influences those sectors. Programs that employ a PYD approach use features that strengthen the environment (communities, schools, families) across, as well as the individual assets, agency, and contribution of young people. There is potential for such foundational supports to have positive impact on a broad range of outcomes across sectors with benefits lasting across a lifetime.
The resources in this section present some of the existing evidence on how health outcomes links with other sectors for youth, along with promising practices in implementation and evaluation.
This section is divided into the following subsections: