Welcome to the fourth in our series, #AdvancingPYD!  This week, we are highlighting the tremendous impact of YouthPower Learning’s grants on the ability of youth-led and youth-driven organizations to advance positive youth development (PYD) in their communities.  

Epifania, a Quechua-speaking young woman in the Cusco region in Peru, didn’t appreciate her own strengths before participating in the Visionaria program, which received funding through a YouthPower Learning grant. 

“Before, I didn’t think I was good at many things...Visionaria taught us that even if you have bad qualities, it’s not an option to beat yourself up. It was incredibly powerful to reflect about the things that were happening in our lives,” said Epifania, who in addition to being a program alumna is also now an advisor. 

The Visionaria Network, which designs programming to empower young people and entrepreneurs, is one of 17 organizations across 20 countries awarded one of YouthPower Learning’s grants under contract. 

These grants supported youth-led and youth-serving organizations in expanding the evidence base for PYD and documenting promising approaches. 

As demonstrated in the YouthPower Learning’s PYD Learning Agenda that will be featured in an upcoming installment of #AdvancingPYD, the learning needs cut across a broad spectrum of topics and sectors. 

Reflecting this diversity, the grant-funded activities ranged from research studies and community campaigns to documentation of lessons learned in project implementation.  

Theme 1: Efforts to assess, evaluate, document, and disseminate innovative work in youth engagement and cross-sectoral youth programming  

The first round of grantees illustrate various ways that youth-serving organizations can leverage youth leadership within PYD programs by partnering with youth as decision-makers, experts, researchers, advocates, mentors, and peer coaches.

Grantee Komo Learning Centres in Uganda exemplified this by producing a series of nine videos delving into the activities and challenges of the organization’s youth-led club in its first year. The youth-led club’s own members and leaders played a central role in conceiving and producing the videos, which offer “day-in-the-life” snapshots to help pave the way for other organizations considering setting up similar clubs.  

Theme 2: Advancing the evidence base for gender-transformative PYD

Grantees in this round sought to better understand internalized gender norms and how they impact young people’s development and opportunities for the future. Some of the key learnings—from across the 17 grants, not just in the second round— touched on gender norms and biases of PYD program staff and gatekeepers, how boys and girls internalize gender norms, gender-based violence, and other challenges. 

For example, Waves for Change, a surf therapy program for youth in South Africa who have been affected by violence and abuse, used the grant to conduct a research study about the impact of gender stereotypes and norms on recruitment and participation in the program.  

Theme 3: Advancing the evidence base for youth civic engagement in effective peacebuilding or in countering/prevention of violent extremism

In the third round, grant initiatives revealed how social marginalization and resource inequality hinder the enabling environment for PYD in conflict-affected areas, how young people assert their agency through both civic engagement and violent extremism in the face of social marginalization and resource inequality, and other learnings. 

The United Network of Young Peacebuilders (UNOY) embarked on a comparative study examining youth roles in civic engagement for peacebuilding in Afghanistan, Libya, Sierra Leone, and Colombia. The grant also helped build youth research capacity through trainings, and research findings were used to develop a series of policy briefs to inform policies and programs related to youth participation in peacebuilding.  

Theme 4: Advancing economic empowerment of young women

Known as the Young Women Transform Prize, the most recent round was designed to support young people in developing their own solutions to advance the economic empowerment of young women in their communities. 

For example, the Disabled Women’s Empowerment Centre in Nepal was founded by and is led by a woman in her early 30s who relies on a wheelchair. The learning grant supported the organization’s accessible training and entrepreneur incubation project for girls and women with disabilities in Nepal. 

Another grantee, Safeplan Uganda, which was founded by a 24-year-old woman, works to create income opportunities for illiterate and landless women in rural Uganda.  

With each successive grant cycle, YouthPower Learning found new ways to directly support youth-led entities and engage youth more in the grantmaking process. As the process evolved, youth went from being the subject of the grant proposals to the ones who were applying for and winning the grants. 

In the coming weeks, YouthPower Learning will be releasing several products capturing learnings from across all four learning grant themes.