Document Library

Key Text Get Youth on Board!: A Toolkit for Stakeholder Collaboration and Youth Promotion

Author: GTZ
Date: 2008
Size: 75 pages (1.4 MB)

Access full text: available online

Summary

How can governmental and non-governmental stakeholders at municipal, provincial and district levels promote the rights and needs of children and youth more effectively? This manual from GTZ (German Development Cooperation) outlines workshops that can facilitate an adaptable, integrated and participatory approach to youth promotion. Structural change is needed to create child and youth-friendly policy environments, and young people need to be empowered to demand and use their rights to participation. Youth have significant contributions to make now, not only in the future.

Young people often form a demographic majority and are the economic pillars of their communities, but they face multiple challenges including structural poverty and political marginalisation. Meaningful development, poverty alleviation and processes of democratic transition or consolidation must consider the needs and potential of young people. Youth promotion is a cross-cutting issue to be considered in the planning, implementation and monitoring of programmes in sectors including education, health, vocational training, good governance, decentralisation and urban planning.

Young people have a right to participation in decisions that affect them. It is not only youth who benefit from youth participation, however. Participation is a means for the development of more effective and target-group oriented youth programmes.

The modules provided inlcudes lectures, presentations, factsheets and group work excercises on topics such as participation, youth health, and youth organisations. Modules cover the following issues:

Creating awareness: introduces child and youth rights (including local/national level analysis) and youth participation.
Analysis for youth promotion: analysis of the life situations of young people in the relevant areas.
Promoting stakeholder collaboration: group strategic planning to outline a common vision and mission and the forms of future cooperation.
Planning for youth promotion: activity planning, the first step of stakeholder cooperation.

The choice of which stakeholders to invite for the workshops is important to the success of the whole process. Facilitators need to help create ownership and legitimacy. They should:

Make sure that participants really represent their population group, organisation or state body.
Try to make well-balanced choices so that no one group of stakeholders is dominant.
Be aware that an invitation may give stakeholders a certain legitimacy.
Understand that planning, budgeting and implementing youth-related activities should include all stakeholders working with young people, including the young people themselves.
Create a positive atmosphere to help youth and adults work together effectively: promote interaction, be sensitive to differences and promote fun.
Be aware that the participatory approach outlined in the modules may challenge cultural norms and existing power structures.

Access full text: available online

Source: GTZ, 2008, 'Get Youth on Board!: A Toolkit for Stakeholder Collaboration and Youth Promotion', Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), Eschborn, Germany
Author: Tina Silbernagl , Tina.Silbernagl[at]gtz.de ; Christiane Frische , christiane.frische[at]gtz.de
Organisation: GTZ, http://www.gtz.de/en/index.htm