Building capacity of youth as agents of change

A true partnership with youth as development actors means that youth play a role in every aspect of the program cycle, from deign through research, implementation and evaluation, even in building capacity of other youth through peer to peer trainings. To ensure that young people are well equipped to do this, UNESCO is supporting a series of key initiatives that provide a variety of capacity building options for young people.

Youth As Researchers is a concept developed by the UNESCO Chairs at National University of Ireland (Galway) and Penn State University. UNESCO has worked with youth in Lao PDR and Viet Nam to provide training and support for youth-led research. A publication on the researchers’ work in Lao PDR will be available in 2019.

Being involved in policy is often a new thing for young people. In 2018 UNESCO supported a training on policy advocacy to assist young people participating on the revision of the Viet Nam’s national youth law. This will be further developed as a training tool in 2019.

UNESCO is currently using the Inclusive Policy Lab crowd-sourcing policy platform to design a Youth As Evaluators program. Not only will this enable better evaluation of the work young people do in partnership with UNESCO, but youth will be able to say what they think about UNESCO’s work with youth. You can join the Youth Evaluation e-team.

UNESCO is also developing training materials on youth advocacy [link to youth advocacy page]