Please use this thread to discuss your experiences, challenges, and successes with Principle 1 in your current work, and how you hope to use it in your future work! How can we work and advocate to ensure we are achieving this principle in our programs?
Explanation: Project teams should engage young people in a safe and ethical manner, paying particular attention to differentials in power and agency between young research participants, youth team members, and adult team members due to factors such as age, socioeconomic status, language, and education levels. Those commissioning, conducting, and funding HCD for ASRH have a shared responsibility to protect the safety, dignity, and wellbeing of young people, as research participants, as team members, and as intended users of the program being designed and/or evaluated. The focus on ethics and safeguarding requires intentional training, planning, protocol development, and preparation throughout the HCD process for young research participants, youth team members, and users.
During the webinar launch, we had a couple of questions on engaging youth from the audience:
What does optimum youth engagement really look like?
What do you do if young people who participate in the programme design e.g. peer educators, working as mobilisers outgrow the target age group when the programme is still ongoing?
It’s really about in the beginning, investing time and resources, compensating people and training them appropriately so that they can support aspects of the design process. And then midway through, do a reflective exercise with them, think about what are the ways that we can enhance their skilling so that they can tear up and lead these processes themselves. To share opportunities for leadership for real co design, equal partnership and training is the best thing that we as a sector can do, working intentionally with young people so that they can go from a youth driven or youth centred approach to a youth led approach- really giving them all agency, supporting their capacity to lead individual work streams themselves. I think that’s where we’ve seen a lot of success in our work at YLabs and I think it’s a pretty powerful thing to do.
Q2: What do you do if young people who participate in the programme design e.g. peer educators, working as mobilisers outgrow the target age group when the programme is still ongoing?
In any kind of skill, building effort to impart and share is that if you’ve invested time and resources in a certain individual if they outgrow the programme, think about ways that we can retain them by enhancing their roles, responsibilities, such that they become the trainers of the peer mobilisers.