Now more than ever before, the way the youth development community engages with young people is changing. 

Increasingly, young people are regarded as partners in our work and as emerging leaders in their communities, rather than as beneficiaries in need of help or a demographic challenge to be solved. 

This is a welcome and necessary shift. With nearly 1.8 billion of the world’s population between the ages of 10 and 29—the largest generation in history—we face an unprecedented opportunity and challenge. In an era with global crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, threatening the very foundations of stability and prosperity of many nations, it is imperative that we work together so young people can become more resilient and are better equipped to make the transition into healthy and productive adulthood.

Since its inception five years ago, YouthPower Learning, a USAID project dedicated to strengthening the evidence base in PYD, has been wholly focused on this goal. 

Over the past 10 weeks, we have brought you the #AdvancingPYD email campaign, highlighting key learnings, collaborations, and progress over the past five years. Now, as our project concludes, we invite you to download our newly launched final project report, “The YouthPower Learning Project: Advancing Youth Development” to learn more about our work and our journey. 

Working shoulder-to-shoulder with an array of partners, we identified existing knowledge and evidence gaps around PYD that we addressed by creating online platforms and a plethora of publications, toolkits, webinars, training, and other resources. 

We also cultivated global communities of practice for practitioners and provided important grant funding to support and learn from local youth-led and youth-serving organizations. 

The transformative impact of this partnership does not stop there. By creating a collaborative space that transcends organizational and sector silos, we have seen a vibrant community flourish around PYD. This momentum ushered in new ways of working and decisions that are better grounded in evidence and best practices. 

While there is more work to be done, I feel this definite culture shift regularly through interactions with partners who now have a solid PYD framework to anchor their activities. I hear it in feedback from USAID Missions that rely on the evidence we amassed to make better-informed investments and design more holistic programs. 

I am deeply indebted to USAID for entrusting us with this endeavor. I am also grateful to my dedicated team at Making Cents International, which leads YouthPower Learning, and to our consortium of talented partners: International Center for Research on Women; Mathematica Policy Research; Results for Development, Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington; Royal Children’s Hospital Academic Centre at the University of Melbourne; Khulisa Management Services; and the Young Americas Business Trust. 

With the end of this project, the next phase begins. As USAID embarks on the next iteration, YouthPower2: Learning and Evaluation, let us continue to challenge our assumptions, nurture the culture of collaboration, and generate the learning needed to close the gaps in our understanding of PYD. 

Above all, let us not forget the young people who lie at the heart of our efforts, and who will be instrumental in healing their communities and economies in the post-COVID world. 

Working together, we can continue to mold a new narrative that is focused on this generation’s capabilities, ingenuity, and potential to create meaningful and lasting change in their communities and beyond. 

Thank you for being on this journey with us—we hope you have enjoyed our #AdvancingPYD series and that you will take the time to explore our final report. We look forward to seeing where this partnership will go next. 

Cassandra Jessee
Director, YouthPower Learning