How to Create Meaningful Youth Engagement

Too often, solutions are designed for youth, without involving youth. This happens across development projects, including in private sector-led initiatives, such as those funded by the Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE). Programmes end up with solutions based merely on assumptions about what youth want. This is a risky approach. It can even negatively affect a company’s profits and growth, with major investments in training going to waste through high youth employee turnover rates (Carnevale et al, 2015).  

Increasingly, our sector is realising the importance of youth engagement, empowerment and resilience, and taking active steps to include and amplify youth voices. The most ambitious are even striving to ‘shift the balance of power’, giving youth the space to be their own agents of change (Development Alternative, 2019). Take the recent Youth@Heart virtual forum, organized by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example. The conference brought together a hive-mind of practitioners, businesses, donors, and most importantly, young people, to brainstorm ideas and solutions for improving youth prospects across Africa and the Middle East.  

We all agreed that listening to the real ambitions of young people is critical to making progress. But the conference inspired us to dig deeper and ask ourselves how we can turn words into actions. How can we really put youth at the heart of youth employment programming?  

CFYE believes that businesses need to prioritise a youth-centric focus for youth employment creation to be successful and sustainable.  

This means, first and foremost, identifying youth aspirations for employment, and the main barriers they face in achieving them. Once known, these considerations should be integrated into the design of a company’s business case. CFYE is not only interested in understanding what youth’s barriers to employment are: we want to see how an intervention addresses some of these barriers and aligns with young people’s stated aspirations.  

Yet as a Fund, we realised that despite believing wholeheartedly in the principles of youth inclusion and empowerment, we were not engaging youth meaningfully enough in our own Challenge Formulation processes. We needed to critically review our approach to youth engagement at scoping stage.  

Our internal stock-take revealed that we needed to make changes at three levels: 

1. Rethink the purpose and the potential of the youth engagement sessions 
2. Adapt our methodology to reflect this thinking  
3. Define new entry points to test youth engagement strategies, examine evidence, and scale the model if proven to work   

1. Rethinking purpose and potential  

Looking back on our first three problem identification studies in Uganda, Egypt and Nigeria, we realised our role went further than simply extracting information from youth panels.  Defining and building youth aspirations is a process that can provide learning opportunities not just for us as the funder, but for young people too.  

In our youth sessions, we often heard from young people setting career ambitions that were either too high or too low –, meaning unrealistic for the labour market, or overly cautious, the latter particularly true of young women. This reflects a pattern detected in the literature on youth aspirations, which shows that young people’s immediate socio-economic environment largely determines what they believe to be acceptable and achievable. For poor young people in particular, this can lead to a ‘failure of aspirations’, meaning they do not develop actionable aspirations that would lift them out of their current standard of living (See Appadurai, 2004; Ray, 2002; Serneels and Dercon, 2014; Boateng and Lowe, 2018). 

In Egypt, we listened to young people with a high level of education talk of their relatable aspirations to find a high-flying, high-paying job, straight out of university. The idea of investing in skills to reach these goals, by taking internships for example, was less common to hear. We also met with young women from lower socio-economic backgrounds, enrolled in technical secondary education courses. Their aspirations overwhelmingly did not ‘fit’ societal norms. Almost all wanted to continue working after having children. Many wanted to have technical jobs in factories or work as electrical engineers. One even wanted to become a body builder.  

 On the other hand, we met young women in Uganda from rural backgrounds, with lower educational levels, whose ambitions were limited to traditionally ‘female’ professions such as hairdressing, in their immediate locality.  We found that youth employment projects operating in the area also tend to lack gender ambition, offering training for traditional ‘female’ occupations, rather than transformative, norm-defying ones.  

Regardless of the direction of the discussion, the sessions established a common understanding among participants that they were all dealing with pushback from society in achieving their dreams. Participants then had the opportunity to discuss strategies on how they could overcome these barriers in their own situations. The sessions became a sort of exchange, of sharing tips and tricks on how to deal with the pressure from all corners: from their communities, from their families, and from themselves.  

It became apparent that we (as a Fund and through our Implementing Partners) can trigger new ideas for what young people deem possible in their working lives. We heard directly from youth participants that our panel sessions gave them a unique and unprecedented opportunity to reflect on their career and life goals. We therefore aspire for our youth panel sessions to go beyond building a richer picture of the youth employment challenges in a given country, important as this aim is for our study teams.  We also see an opportunity to inspire young people to (re)define their ambitions.  

2. Adapting methodology accordingly  

To reflect a wider cross-section of youth goals and ambitions, and capture and integrate these more strategically into our challenge formulations, we needed to make changes to our young engagement methodology. The main learnings from the first three challenge calls, which we have adapted for our latest calls for proposals were around timing and sampling.  

• Timing – we noticed that we could be more effective if we involved youth at a later stage of the research. In the first three studies, youth aspiration sessions were held early in the process; this meant they turned into an open and rather general discussion on young participants’ dreams, hope and ambitions. For the most recent studies, we decided to involve youth when we were further along in shaping the call for solutions. Besides listening to their views on the barriers to youth employment and hearing more about their aspirations for work, this meant we could verify our latest study findings with them. In short, changing the timing of the youth engagement sessions allowed us to co-create, and actively involve youth in shaping the call for proposals.  
• Sampling – In our first three studies in Uganda, Egypt and Nigeria, we used a small, inevitably self-selecting sample group of young people. This was largely due to lack of time to prepare, and lack of in-country teams and networks to extend our sample size. Such an approach made it difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from these youth sessions. How could we know that these views were broadly representative, and how could we hear from less ‘easy-to-reach’ groups of youth? To engage a larger sample size of youth from more diverse backgrounds, and in a less time-intensive way, we decided to use a combination of research methods. In the most recent studies, we increased our collaboration with local researchers and youth networks to ensure that we could reach more rural, excluded voices. Local teams have worked with smaller in-person groups, and we made sure to hold several training sessions beforehand to establish rules for data use and level of detail. We also increased the number of youth researchers – so for example, in Kenya, many researchers were youth volunteers and active youth network participants themselves. These are the early efforts of a participatory research model we’re rolling out in future calls; an attempt to redress the unequal the power balance between researcher and researched. Beyond that we started to conduct online surveys, allowing us to reach a much greater number of youth, albeit ones with internet connection. We also used online meetings to connect with groups with higher levels of education, and with direct access and links to our in-country researchers. 

We also recognised the value in some aspects of our initial approach and wanted to ensure these were kept up. We continue to reassess our approach to youth engagement whenever we enter a new country, to make sure it is tailored to the specific context, and fit-for-purpose within it (see a worked example of this from South Sudan below). While we wanted to build a more representative sample size of respondents, we also saw that focusing on personal stories, without hoping to present them as scientific analysis, can be a powerful communications tool. We really appreciated the anecdotes and quotes that these stories generated, and found they were useful in getting a message across in a pithy way. We felt our original approach of using participatory methods, such as flashcards, problem trees and visuals, was a very effective way of eliciting personal stories. 

And while we have recently begun to seek youth feedback on our research findings, we did not want to lose the focus on youth aspirations. This gave and continues to give us important insights into young people’s point of view and can be a useful implicit proxy for better understanding their barriers to decent employment.  

3. What next for our Youth Empowerment, Engagement and Resilience (YEER) approach?  

We see our YEER approach as constantly evolving. We’re always on the look-out for new methodologies to incorporate into our research, which could strengthen our ability to include and amplify youth voices. Take South-Sudan, the latest country we have entered, as an example.  

In South-Sudan, most young people drop out of education at primary school level, and therefore have difficulties reading and writing. With this in mind, we’ve decided to retain and strengthen the focus on visual  techniques in the discussion groups. We used storytelling, problem tree drawing, and other elements to make the sessions are useful and inclusive as possible. We will also continue to use a mix of data collection techniques, both qualitative as quantitative, to enrich our picture of the challenges faced by youth in finding decent work.  

We also see opportunities to trial some new approaches for engaging youth in South-Sudan.  

We expect report on our latest findings and to add to our lists of key learnings and recommendations later this year. Keep an eye on our website and social media channels to stay up to date.