YouthPower Action supports USAID's goal of strengthening youth programming across all country contexts and sectors. Activities that increase youth engagement and youth voice are infused throughout YouthPower Action. Through this project, USAID is advancing the goal laid out in USAID’s Youth in Development policy which seeks to improve the capacities and enable the aspirations of youth so that they can contribute to and benefit from more stable, democratic, and prosperous communities and nations. Resources below are organized according to the following eight thematic areas, or download the full list here:
Monitoring and Evaluation
Community Score Card
This methodological guide provides the process and steps to implement the Community Score Card as part of an orphaned and vulnerable children program.
Assessments
Youth Compass: A Strategic Guide to Strengthen Youth Activities
This guide increases implementers’ abilities to achieve intended results of a youth activity, bring those results to scale, and sustain them. The publication is a strategic process for: analyzing a youth activity’s weaknesses, opportunities, or gaps; identifying and prioritizing actions to strengthen the activity; and incorporating the “strengthening actions” into the activity.
Nigeria Cross-Sectoral Youth Assessment
This youth assessment considers Nigerian youth and seeks to highlight youth needs and priorities across sectors, with attention to the most marginalized youth and differences by gender.
Youth Engagement and Empowerment
Youth Engagement Training for DREAMS
This training toolkit is to strengthen efforts USG staff, other donor organizations, and implementing partners to meaningfully include youth in development initiatives. The training is designed primarily for implementing partners of the DREAMS initiative and USG staff, including USAID, working in five countries (Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Zambia).
Youth Club Curriculum (Currículo para as Sessões do Clube Infantil, Grupos de Pais e Cuidadores e Líderes Comunitários)
This curriculum is for youth ages 10-18 to be used at community clubs for orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) and for use in dialogues with community leaders and parents’ groups. The curriculum, which is in Portuguese, covers seven essential services for OVCs.
YouthPower Action AGYW Mentoring Program Toolkit
This toolkit supports the implementation of this holistic approach in a group-based, safe-space setting for adolescent girls and young women (AGYW).
Using the Action Learning Approach to Enhance Youth Leadership and Agency: Lessons from the Adolescent Girls and Young Women Pilot Project in Johannesburg Townships
This brief discusses lessons learned from a pilot project aimed at building the capacity of selected young women and girls to drive advocacy actions in their communities.
Mentor Program for Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Uganda Infographic
This infographic describes a pilot intervention consisting of curricula covering sexual and reproductive health, financial capabilities, soft skills, and gender-based violence and gender-equality content.
Cross-Sectoral
Examples of Positive Youth Development Program Activities Aligned with PYD Features, Mapped to a Socio-Ecological Model
This handout provides illustrative activities that PYD programs could implement. The sample activities provided transcend sectors and could be applied in a variety of settings to achieve sectoral outcomes of interest.
Integrated Reproductive Health and Workforce Development Study in Bangladesh
This study is based on a project intended to build the evidence base that will guide more holistic and cross-sectoral youth programming and summarizes an assessment of interventions that integrate workforce development and sexual and reproductive health.
Assessment of Integrated Workforce Development and Sexual and Reproductive Health Interventions with Recommendations for the Future
This report discusses research on programs that seek to address both sexual and reproductive health and workforce development to better understand the nature and impact of such integrated programs.
Brief: Proponte Más Honduras
This brief looks at the Proponte Más project's family-focused approach to PYD within a comprehensive program for violence reduction in Honduras.
Brief: Feed the Future Tanzania Advancing Youth
This brief highlights how the PYD approach can position youth to become economically and socially productive members of their communities within an integrated program focused on youth workforce development.
Brief: Programa Para o Futuro Mozambique
This brief highlights how the PYD approach can help extremely vulnerable youth move from a vicious cycle of HIV risk to a virtuous, protective cycle, using a case study from a cross-sectoral, integrated youth development program in Mozambique.
Programa Para o Futuro Mozambique: Rapid Assessment Report
This report unpacks the key elements that contribute to Programa Para o Futuro Mozambique’s success and challenges to expand the knowledge base about learnings from YouthPower investments and the challenges that hinder the success of a positive youth development program.
Young Emanzi Toolkit for Mentoring Adolescent Boys and Young Men
This toolkit for mentoring adolescent boys and young men includes group-based mentoring and curricula-based programming covering gender, soft skills, financial literacy, puberty and reproductive health, addiction and alcohol abuse, and violence prevention.
Soft Skills for Cross-Sectoral Outcomes Assessment: Administration Guide
This tool guides the administration of soft skills tool. It covers the basics of the tool itself and offer recommendations for contextualizing and adapting the assessment, as well as analyzing its results.
Measuring Soft Skills Among Youth and Young Adults: Validation of a New Instrument
This report describes the process of a soft skills instrument development and presents the results of the testing and validation at two sites.
Soft Skills
Soft Skills Research Suite
This microsite highlights a suite of tools and research to support implementers in developing youth's soft skills. The site includes an inventory of the skills identified in two literature reviews as enjoying strong and wide-ranging support across multiple outcomes.
Key Soft Skills for Cross-Sectoral Youth Outcomes
This paper identifies which soft skills enjoy the most support for predicting positive outcomes for youth across the three fields of workforce development, violence prevention, and sexual and reproductive health, and, thus, should be cultivated as part of strategies to create those positive outcomes.
Measuring Soft and Life Skills in International Youth Development Programs: A Review and Inventory of Tools
This report provides a review and inventory of tools that measure cross-cutting skills, based on key criteria for use by international youth development programs.
Guiding Principles for Building Soft and Life Skills among Adolescents and Young Adults
This report, which identifies six guiding principles for effective skill-building programs, provides specific examples of effective practice applying each principle, drawing from international and U.S. youth programs across the fields of workforce development, violence prevention, and sexual and reproductive health.
YouthPower Action Youth Soft Skills Assessment
This tool measures critical soft skills domains that are important to multiple positive youth outcomes in workforce, violence prevention, and family planning and reproductive health. Available in English and Spanish.
Workforce Development and Entrepreneurship
South Africa Health Workforce Assessment
This assessment explores opportunities and challenges for youth employment in health and social services, including a review of youth workforce programs and a mapping of potential opportunities for expanding youth employment in health and social services.
What Works in Entrepreneurship Education and Training Programs for Youth?
This evidence report summarizes evidence for what works in youth entrepreneurship training and support interventions.
What Works in Education and Training for Youth Entrepreneurship
This report summarizes evidence for what works in youth entrepreneurship training and support interventions, and is intended to help funders and implementing partners understand reasonable outcomes from entrepreneurship programs and apply this understanding to future programming.
Empowering Youth to Overcome Health Workforce Shortages
This assessment explores opportunities and challenges for youth employment in health and social services, including a review of youth workforce programs that provide vocational training, career guidance, job placement, and related services. The analysis maps potential opportunities for expanding youth employment in health and social services based on key informant interviews, a literature review, and labor market data.
Agriculture and Food Security
Recommendations for Youth Programming in Food for Peace Development Food Security Activities (DFSA)
This survey of implementing partners highlights how they currently address youth needs, reviewing two DFSA to strengthen understanding of how youth needs are being addressed and providing recommendations and tools for Food for Peace (FFP).
Health
Improving Retention in HIV Care Among Adolescents and Adults in Low- and Middle-income Countries: A Systematic Review of the Literature
This literature review identifies strategies that could be adapted to meet the needs of adolescents living with HIV.
Interventions to Improve Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Among Adolescents in LMICs: A Systematic Review of the Literature
This systematic review of peer-reviewed and grey literature identifies interventions designed to improve antiretroviral adherence among adults and adolescents in LMICs.
An Online Support Group Intervention for Adolescent Living with HIV in Nigeria: A Pre-Post Test Study
This study evaluates the feasibility of implementing a social media-based intervention to improve HIV knowledge, social support, antiretroviral adherence, and retention among adolescents living with HIV on antiretrovirals in Nigeria.
SMART Connections Infographic
This infographic depicts a tool in an online information and support group intervention delivered via closed secret Facebook groups to youth living with HIV.
Mentoring Interventions and the Impact of Protective Assets on the Reproductive Health of Adolescent Girls and Young Women
This review outlines types of mentoring programs for AGYW that have been shown to be effective in improving protective assets, and/or reproductive health knowledge, intentions, behaviors, or outcomes, with interventions identified.
Integrating Workforce and Reproductive Health Interventions for Improved Youth Outcomes
This study investigates two major research questions: 1) Does integrating WfD and FP/RH components facilitate stronger workforce and FP/RH outcomes than a WfD intervention alone? 2) How does integration take place? What are the associated challenges, best practices and solutions?
A Social Media–Based Support Group for Youth Living With HIV in Nigeria (SMART Connections): Randomized Controlled Trial
This study tested the effectiveness of a structured support group intervention, Social Media to promote Adherence and Retention in Treatment (SMART) Connections, delivered through a social media platform, on HIV treatment retention among YLHIV aged 15 to 24 years and on secondary outcomes of antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence, HIV knowledge, and social support.