Understanding Youth leadership and Youth-led Development

20 Oct 2022

In the past decade, the world has woken up to the power of youth-led development. This is inherently based in the contributions made by young people to society in the past as well as renewed focus on their role given we are in the era of peak youth generation. Youth leadership is backed to contribute in solving biggest challenges facing us today. When Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were agreed upon, then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared young people would become their “torch-bearers”. International bodies like the UN Security Council lined up to agree resolutions and plans of action and the UN launched a Youth2030 strategy. Many of the governments like the USA, Denmark and UK published new strategies backing young people to tackle the world’s biggest development challenges, recognising them as “proponents of stable democracies, strong societies and prosperous economies”, “equal actors with the ability and opportunity to take development into their own hands” and even “agents of change”.

What does youth leadership and ‘youth-led development’ mean? 

Youth participation can be best understood to mean a process through which young people influence and share control over the decisions and resources which affect them. Two important models - Roger Hart’s ‘Ladder of Youth Participation’ and Naima Wong’s ‘Typology of Youth Participation and Empowerment (TYPE) Pyramid’ – emphasise the steps between tokenistic and meaningful youth participation. Both view shared decision-making between adults and youth as the highest form of participation. 

Youth leadership can be best understood to mean when young people have the assets – like skills, knowledge, confidence, agency, values, networks and experience – to inspire others towards a common purpose. Youth empowerment – the process of young people taking on power, authority and agency – can contribute to youth leadership. For many youth initiatives and programmes, youth leadership can be the objective and the endpoint of any intervention. 

Youth-led development harnesses youth leadership to achieve positive, external change in wider society:

• It is commonly understood as an approach - rather than an objective in itself. 
• The objectives of youth-led development may vary widely - and do not need to focus on developing young leaders or even working towards the goals of young people. For example, objectives could include anything from building a classroom to developing a national climate change strategy.
• Youth-led development approaches consistently see young people as an asset instead of a problem. 
• Youth-led development approaches tend to acknowledge that young people can play multiple roles. For example, the UK Department for International Development’s 2016 Youth Agenda argues young people are (1) experiencing [positive] transitions into adulthood (2) delivering development as agents of change and (3) making their voices heard as advocates.  
• The DFID-CSO Youth Working Group’s 2010 Three Lens Approach to Youth Participation distinguishes between young people as (1) beneficiaries (2) partners and (3) leaders in development. Similarly, another helpful distinction is between youth-focused development; youth-implemented development; and youth-led development. 

There are no hard and fast rules about what is and what is not youth-led development. Most youth leadership and youth-led development flies under the radar: it exists in the daily actions, work and civic life of young people - often invisible, unmeasured and undervalued.

Our experiences suggest that programmes and interventions are most effective when their objective is a development outcome, rather than only youth leadership. There is stronger evidence in some areas than others that the approach of young leaders mobilising communities is effective. For example, young leaders are particularly effective as peer educators on adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (AYSRHR) issues. Many civil society organisations (CSOs), governments and development agencies deliver programmes that create more structured pathways for youth-led development. In practice, such interventions most commonly support young leaders to change behaviour or mobilise action in their communities, strengthen accountability in development, inform and influence policy and practice and organise for long-term power and impact.

The objectives of youth-led development can range from broader goals - like clean water, peace-building, or responsive public services - through to goals that might matter particularly to young people - like a decent livelihood or sexual and reproductive health. The people whose lives are improved by youth-led development can range from the wider community to young people themselves. The role played by young people in youth-led development can range from delivering or implementing activities right through to designing and initiating a programme themselves. The extent to which youth-led development addresses root causes can vary - from programmes that accept an existing system and work to improve its functioning through to campaigns that aim to fundamentally change or transform a system. No matter the differences, youth-led development interventions share one simple hypothesis: support young people to lead development, and they will improve outcomes.  

No matter the differences, youth-led development interventions share one simple hypothesis: support young people to lead development, and they will improve outcomes.

The qualities of a young leader
Young leaders hold multiple identities, defy stereotypes and are not all the same. Their qualities vary enormously, but can include:

• Lived experience of the issues affecting young people and often of different types of exclusion
• Social capital and the ability to inspire and persuade their peers
• Creativity, energy and a willingness to use participatory methods
• A blend of passion and professionalism
• An openness to learn, with few constraints on their thinking
• Innovation and entrepreneurialism
• An ability to take advantage of new technology and social media to change behaviour, access information or organise more effectively
• Different norms, that can be more progressive, shared with a generational ‘cohort’, and taken into later life
• A capacity to take formative youth leadership experiences into life as an adult - including when they take on decision-making roles.

Lessons for those sparking youth leadership and youth-led development

With an increasing commitment to youth engagement in the development sector, Restless Development often gets asked how international development practitioners can ‘do meaningful youth engagement’ – so our answer is: let’s ask young people. We heard clearly from young people that youth-led civil society and young people don’t want to get ‘reached’, they rather want to meaningfully participate in and lead development. Based on evidence from our multiple decades of experience of youth-led development, and after supporting young people from across the globe, we had a go at answering that question of how to make meaningful youth engagement practical - we came up with this bull’s-eye :

Common mistakes and how development practitioners can make sure to hit the bull’s-eye

1. A young person in the room is not meaningful. Youth engagement is not simply having a young person involved or present in a development programme or initiative. There are many forms that young people’s involvement can take: from the non-participatory forms of manipulation, decoration and tokenism to the fully participatory standard of youth participation with shared decision-making or youth leadership through young people initiating change and adults supporting. For a young person to meaningfully engage in a development initiative they need to have clear roles and responsibilities, feel ownership over the initiative, have a sense of belonging with it and be able to either partner in or lead development. Shared decision making with young people is key to both of this.
    
2. Youth engagement does not happen without people and relationships. Simply put, youth engagement is a relationship between two actors, a development practitioner and the young person. They way in which this relationship is structured determines whether the engagement is meaningful or not. Development practitioners have two main roles within this. The first is to open up closed spaces or create new spaces. In this sense spaces can be anything from the physical space of engagement to the opportunity within which the young person is being engaged. The second is through capacity building and individual support to make sure that rather than bringing a development initiative or opportunity ‘down to the young person’s level,’ we are upskilling, motivating and supporting the young person to meet development practitioners or other decision-makers in the development initiative or opportunity.
    
3. Youth engagement cannot be our only goal or end goal. Youth engagement is action orientated and therefore a process rather than an end in itself. While well intended, development initiatives focused only on youth engagement can result in a disempowering experience for the young person if they cannot answer the question of what they are working to achieve. It will be hard for the young person to understand what their role is within an initiative and even harder for them to truly partner in or lead the initiative. It is important, even before considering how to meaningfully engage a young person in development, that the practitioner has already thought about the mandate that development initiative has within which youth engagement will take place. This does not mean that the end goal needs to be decided ahead of engaging the young person. For meaningful youth engagement a young person needs to be involved throughout the entire program or initiative cycle, from agenda setting, to planning, designing, implementation, storytelling and monitoring and evaluating.
    
4. Meaningful youth engagement is hard – but worth it. Hard work yes, but by approaching youth engagement in a conscious and thoughtful way it can be pretty straightforward. All a development practitioner needs to do is ask, listen, trust, open up in a transparent way and be in it for the long-term. And to make it even easier, when you are creating or reviewing a youth engagement opportunity the Meaningful Youth Engagement bull’s-eye can be used together with the following five questions to ask yourself:

• Which young person(s) are you engaging and why them?
• What is the defined role and responsibility for the young person(s) you are engaging?
• What is the space within which the engagement will take place?
• What is the mandate that the young person(s) will have in this engagement and what is the result they can hope to achieve or the change that development practitioners are prepared to make based on youth engagement?
• What support and which spaces will you as the development practitioner be offering them (type, length, activities etc.)?

About Restless Development:

At the heart of everything we do is Youth Power.We are a non-profit global agency that supports the collective power of young leaders to create a better world. More than ever the world needs young people’s power and leadership to solve its greatest challenges. Every year we train, mentor, nurture and connect thousands of young people to use their youth power and lead change. We formed in 1985 and have been working with young people ever since.

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