YouthPower Newsletter May 2020

Welcome!

The last few months have been a flurry of activity as we wrap up work for YouthPower Learning, and start the next phase, YouthPower 2: Learning and Evaluation (YP2LE). Since the beginning of March, we’ve highlighted key learnings, collaborations, and progress over the last five years in our #AdvancingPYD series. The series will culminate in a final report, which will be released in the coming days. 

As the project closes, we have reflected on the breadth of knowledge and experience gained and shared over the last five years. YouthPower Learning has helped to ensure that the right tools are in the right hands at the right time. Beyond that, the project helped build a sense of community among youth practitioners around the globe through communities of practice, learning grants, and a PYD learning agenda—demonstrating the power of sharing collective knowledge and high-quality, accessible learnings.

In addition, we have released a number of new products in the last few months: a Toolkit on Adolescents Living with HIV, a suite of documents on Applications of Effectuation Theory on Youth Entrepreneurship Programs, and new briefs, including Improving Positive Youth Outcomes through the Use of Safe Spaces in Low-and Middle-Income Countries and Evidence and Promising Practices from Peer-Based Approaches in Youth Programs. 

We encourage you to join the Learning Network as it enters its next phase! Register on youthpower.org and set up your profile to ensure you are a part of the Network and receive quarterly updates on YP2LE as the project transitions to its next phase. (If you are a member of YouthLead, you are automatically a member of youthpower.org, so there is no need to re-register.) 

Finally, we invite you to visit our revamped resources and events pages to access all of the content from the project! In the coming weeks, we will be adding the final resources that are still underway. Stay tuned for updates to the Learning Agenda, learnings from the grants, and the final project report.

- The YouthPower Learning Team 

Around the World with YouthPower

USAID/Honduras Beneficiaries Provide Essential Services During COVID-19 Pandemic

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people around the world are staying at home in order to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. In Honduras and many other developing countries with weakened health care systems and struggling economies, stay-at-home restrictions are critical. However, for the majority of citizens to be able to comply with lockdown orders, some workers must leave the safety of their homes to provide the health care and essential services that communities need in order to survive. To honor and to thank all of the people who are valiantly risking their health to provide vital services for their communities and countries, the USAID-funded Honduras Workforce Development Activity, Empleando Futuros, highlights the work of Honduran youth who represent the best of their country during this time of crisis. All youth completed Empleando Futuros workforce training, found employment, and are now showing the resilience that Honduras needs at this time.  

Yoseline Moreno, a 21-year-old from Tegucigalpa, is truly on the frontlines of Honduras' COVID-19 response. As an employee of COPECO, Honduras' Emergency Response Commission, Yoseline prepares shelters for suspected COVID-19 patients, supervises the lines of people outside of supermarkets, banks and pharmacies to ensure that they are practicing safe social distancing, and prepares food to be delivered to vulnerable communities. 

Yoseline says she feels good about what she is doing. Although her family worries about her being exposed to the virus, they support her because of the country's need at this time and because of her passion for her work. "Empleando Futures was a great school for what we are living now. In COPECO, it is essential to work as a team, especially during this health crisis that Honduras faces. Empleando Futures taught me to communicate better, work in a team, manage conflicts, and be assertive." - Yoseline. Read more.

Using Skills Learned through USAID Bridges to Employment to Respond to the Pandemic

Recently, the textiles company INTRADESA, one of USAID Bridges to Employment’s private-sector collaborating partners, announced it was coordinating with the Cámara de la Industria Textil y de la Confección (CAMTEX) to donate face masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) manufactured in its local factory to assist in the Government of El Salvador’s response to the COVID-19 emergency. Among the company’s dedicated employees working on this production effort is Bryan, a young man from the high-crime community of Santa Ana who completed the Operation of Industrial Apparel Machines course offered by USAID-funded grantee Fe y Alegría.

Bryan is working stitch by stitch with INTRADESA to respond to the urgent demand for PPE. Instituting rigorous sanitary protocols, the company recently shifted its production from casual clothing to essential items, supplying health care workers with critical gear such as masks and protective smocks. 

Eager to do something positive for his community and the world, Bryan pitched in and is now drawing on the skills he learned through his USAID-funded training to make a difference. Learn more.

With New Skills, Cocoa Farmer Uplifts His Family and Village

With New Skills, Cocoa Farmer Uplifts His Family and VillageThree hours on horseback from the closest town, Miguel Pineda is generating income and improving the economic stability of his community by tapping into a key resource of his rural village: cocoa. Pineda, 26, began producing cocoa in 2014 and has since dedicated himself to honing his skills to better provide for his family and share knowledge with his neighbors in El Bambú, in the Southern Caribbean Coast region of Nicaragua. As part of his desire to learn, Pineda enrolled in a course in cocoa agronomy developed through USAID’s Aprendo y Emprendo project. The week-long course combined workshops with hands-on experience and allowed students to visit and learn from cocoa growers in surrounding areas, picking up new management practices and identifying opportunities for improvement. 

For Pineda, the course was a new experience and a spark that ignited an enthusiasm for developing his technical skills and perfecting the production process. “Seeing how other producers do it, I realized that I could improve things,” he says. “I encouraged myself to start a new phase of development and growth.” Pineda, along with his brothers and nephews, work the eight acres of land they dedicated to cocoa in order to provide for their family. Pineda’s most recent harvest of nearly 950 pounds of cocoa earned $315. Cocoa production has expanded significantly over the past several years and has the potential to transform livelihoods of small-scale farmers in the region. Read more.

CFYR – Building Youth Advocates in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean 

Sherwin Bart is slowly coming to terms with the fact that he is an advocate. This title is one he never associated with his work with youth, the elderly, the LGBTQ community, and his church community in Georgetown, Guyana. By his own admission, he says he did not realize that what he has been doing all his young life is, in fact, advocacy.  “Just like I want people to accept me for who I am…I want the same for everyone else,” said Sherwin, who is now the Secretary of the Lodge Community Enhancement Committee (CEC). 

Lodge is one of CFYR’s focus communities in Georgetown, Guyana, where Sherwin also attended a number of workshops put on by CFYR. His involvement in the CEC, as well as a local Community Policing Group (CPG), reflect his concern that Guyanese men are in trouble. Sherwin feels he can play a role in helping to build a more wholesome community, and contribute to a safer, more secure environment overall.  

Sherwin is currently one of 29 participants from the Eastern and Southern Caribbean actively engaging in an Online Advocacy Course (OAC) being implemented by USAID through CFYR; the OAC Webinar Series is guiding young people through the steps involved in designing and implementing advocacy programs to address issues that leave their communities vulnerable to crime and violence. As a result of participating in the course, Sherwin, whose group dubbed themselves the Peace Influencers, intends to use the knowledge gained to help men, in his community and beyond, to understand that all men struggle one way or another, and they need to help build each other up.  He believes that when men understand their role in the family, they can contribute to creating safer and better neighborhoods, communities, towns, regions, and a better country, leading to a large decrease in violence overall. Learn more.

Providing Key Stakeholders with the Tools and Know-How to Assist Vulnerable Populations 

Understanding that many Salvadoran youth face barriers to their education and employment due to their day-to-day struggle with threats of violence, extortion, abuse, and/or discrimination, USAID Bridges to Employment developed a Psychosocial Assistance Toolkit to provide communities and institutions with critical information to help link youth to the specific assistance they need.

On February 4, Bridges to Employment disseminated the Toolkit—consisting of a protocol and five reference guides—to 20 staff members representing 12 partner government agencies, workforce development service providers, and civil society organizations. This toolkit provides training on how to apply these resources to address the particular needs of: 1) youth in conditions of social-labor exclusion, 2) youth affected by crime and violence, 3) young returned migrants, 4) youth with disabilities, and 5) young victims of labor discrimination. Equipped with an understanding of the most common challenges each group faces, step-by-step instructions for psychosocial interventions as well as a directory of available services, these key stakeholders are now better prepared to provide critical care and assistance to support job-seeking vulnerable youth across El Salvador for years to come. Read more.

UPCOMING EVENTS

May 13, 2020: YouthLead Webinar: Leveraging Social Media to Advocate for Transparency and Accountability in the COVID-19 Pandemic
May 14, 2020: Webinar: Evidence for Gender and Education Resource
May 19, 2020: Webinar: People Power in a Pandemic
May 27, 2020: Webinar: Results Roundup- New Findings from First-Time Parent Programs
June 1-5, 2020: OpEx Africa Online Conference 2020

The Transition to YP2LE 

For the last five years, YouthPower Learning has been committed to generating and disseminating knowledge about the implementation and impact of positive youth development (PYD) and cross-sectoral approaches in international development. Building on that legacy, the USAID-funded follow-on activity YouthPower2: Learning and Evaluation (YP2LE) will carry on that commitment. 

As YouthPower Learning draws to a close, YP2LE will continue to promote a shared understanding of PYD whereby young people are empowered to reach their full potential. PYD transitions away from problem-focused responses to youth crises, to proactively building skills, fostering healthy relationships, transforming systems, and making youth an active partner in development efforts.

YP2LE has ramped up activities in recent months, after a virtual kick-off event was held in December 2019. In March, the first Learning Agenda Advisory Group (LAAG) meeting was held with eight of nine primary LAAG members, plus representatives from Making Cents. The purpose of the meeting was to engage in research priority setting for the first phase of the activity. 

The YP2LE team also conducted a Learning Network assessment, which included, among other activities, interviews, survey of community of practice members, and a survey of broader Learning Network members. The findings will help inform future Learning Network activities and how YP2LE can continue to improve Network engagement.

In addition to this, YP2LE defined a scope of work for the new Youth Advisory Group (YAG), which began recruiting for members in April. The YAG will be a group of young leaders that play a vital role in ensuring that meaningful youth engagement and leadership occurs across all YP2LE tasks and related activities and will commence later this month. 

Finally, YP2LE will work collaboratively with USAID missions and operating units, through a highly flexible buy-in mechanism, to develop and implement various scopes of work focused on integrating PYD principles and practices. This technical assistance will include performing country youth assessments as well as activity design and evaluation. Work is already underway in Guinea, Mauritania (both of which were started under YouthPower Learning), Madagascar, Eastern and Southern Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, the Youth in Agri-Food Systems Learning Initiative, Protecting Children and Youth within USAID Education Programming, and the W-GDP DREAMS Collaboration. Stay tuned for quarterly updates on these activities and others! 

Learn more about the transition to YouthPower2: Learning and Evaluation.

Recognizing the Contributions Made by YouthPower Action 

YouthPower Action officially wrapped up in February of this year. The project, which was part of the YouthPower mechanism, was dedicated to scaling evidence-based, positive youth development in all sectors and country contexts to improve capacities and enable the aspirations of youth so they can contribute to and benefit from more stable, democratic, and prosperous communities and nations.

Below are a few highlights of the more recent resources that YouthPower Action produced:

The YouthPower Action Soft Skills Tool measures critical soft skills domains that are important to multiple positive youth outcomes in workforce, violence prevention, and family planning and reproductive health. These domains are positive self-concept, negative self-concept, higher order thinking, and social and communication. The resource provides a script with questions to ask youth when assessing soft skills.

The report Measuring Soft Skills Among Youth and Young Adults: Validation of a New Instrument describes the process of development for the YouthPower Action Youth Soft Skills Assessment for youth in lower-resource environments, as well as presents the results of the testing and validation at two sites.

The Soft Skills for Cross-Sectoral Outcomes Assessment: Administration Guide assists in the implementation of the YouthPower Action Soft Skills tool. The guide covers the basics of the tool itself and offers recommendations for contextualizing and adapting the assessment, as well as analyzing its results.

Building on a review of integrated youth workforce development (WfD) and family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) interventions, the Integrating Workforce and Reproductive Health Interventions for Improved Youth Outcomes 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? YouthPower Action carried out this study in the context of the Skills to Succeed (S2S) program, implemented by Save the Children and three local partners in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, with youth program participants who had at least an eighth-grade education.

The Office of Food for Peace’s (FFP) encouraged Implementing Partners (IPs) to include youth in activities starting in 2016. While many IPs have experience working with youth and it is likely that most FFP programs are already supporting young beneficiaries, the focus on youth was new for Development Food Security Activities (DFSA). In the Recommendations for Youth Programming in Food for Peace Development Food Security Activities (DFSA) tool, YouthPower Action sought to learn how FFP IPs were supporting youth during implementation rather than to evaluate the activities. The project also reviewed two DFSAs to better understand how youth needs are being addressed and provide recommendations, tips, and tools for FFP.

NEW RESOURCES ON YOUTHPOWER.ORG

YouthPower Learning Resources

Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL)

Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance

Economic Growth, Education, and Environment

Gender

Health

Agriculture

Find more resources and events at YouthPower.org.

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