Taking Action: Untapped Potential
Building on the Women's Commission's previous research with youth, as well as current work on education and livelihoods, and based on the priority needs and gaps identified by the young people themselves, the Women's Commission is promoting more attention to and services for displaced youth. The project will:
- Initiate a global applied research project on displaced youth, which will
include mapping their needs, available services, innovative practices and
service delivery gaps. The project will identify "good practices"
that respond to the needs of refugee, internally displaced and returnee
young women and men. Effective methodologies for youth programming will
be identified, assessed and widely shared. Project focus will include addressing
the needs of diverse groups within the youth population — former combatants,
married girls, unaccompanied and separated minors, etc.
- Consult and partner with displaced young people to identify needs and
gaps in services and to involve them in project research and advocacy.
- Promote education, employment and life skills as vehicles for engagement
with young people and assessing needed linkages between educational services
and livelihood programs. Practices covered and promoted will include those
that address access and barriers to secondary school attendance, alternative
and accelerated learning programs, non-formal educational programs and life
skills projects and how each of these can be coupled with opportunities
to develop vocational skills and then directly linked to self-reliance activities.
Emphasis will be given to those programs that take a holistic approach.
- Encourage donors and humanitarian organizations to place youth higher
on the international agenda and to provide more attention, funding and targeted
programs for young women and men that create opportunities, hope and meaningful
futures.
- Feed into global research on appropriate livelihoods for displaced women
and youth. This project seeks to transform the way livelihood programs are
designed and implemented in order to make them more successful, effective
and inclusive of the needs and capacities of displaced young men and women.
The project will delineate the types of livelihood interventions available;
assist in identifying which interventions are most appropriate in which
contexts and with which populations; provide guidance on design and implementation
of programs; and include the development of tools and promising practices.
Read our report Youth and Sustainable
Livelihoods:Linking Vocational Training Programs to Market Opportunities
in Northern Uganda. Or read the executive
summary of the report. The Market Assessment Toolkit and Analysis Guide
will be available here in September 2008.