The world today has an ever increasing population of young people. With 1.8 billion youths between the ages of 10 and 24, they are the largest generation of young people to date. They are also disproportionately affected by ongoing global challenges, climate change, and conflict. In the face of these challenges, this young generation has stepped into increasingly frontline political and social leadership roles, keen to be active in addressing the issues that are most important to them.

Research on young people has been growing since the 2000s, and the participation of adolescents and young people in political action is receiving growing attention. While there are an increasing amount of programmes that promote youth involvement, participation in the research cycle can often be tokenistic rather than substantive.

The engagement of young people at all levels of research and in decision-making processes – especially those that affect their wellbeing and future – is crucial to the advancement of young people’s wellbeing globally. Some useful resources we have found are listed here. We are always on the lookout for more that you have found valuable – please get in touch!

• The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) recently published a practical guide to meaningfully engaging the youth in evaluation processes. ‘Leveraging the power of youth in evaluation’ was developed collaboratively by young people, the EvalYouth Global Network and the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO). The 22-page guide provides practical and useful ways to engage young people in each phase of the evaluation process and helps the reader to better understand “how” to engage young people in evaluation in a more intentional, systematic and meaningful manner. 

 

• The second Youth in Evaluation week 2024 was held between 8 and 12 July 2024, with an overarching theme of ‘Upholding Youth in evaluation standards’. The week’s event will explore six dimensions of the standards: leadership and accountability, practice, advocacy and capacity building, knowledge management and communication, human resources and financial resources. You can access the recordings of the virtual sessions here.

 

• The toolkit for Engaging Young and Emerging Evaluators (YEEs) in Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluation (VOPEs) was developed by EvalYouth  to identify the good practices currently used to engage YEEs, in order to scale them up in other contexts. It will provide you with background information regarding current engagement of YEEs within VOPEs, as well as the gaps, and concludes with a checklist and recommendations for engagement. 

 

• The African Evidence Youth League (AEYL) is paving the way for a new generation of evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) youth leaders. In their manifesto, the AEYL puts forward their vision of an African continent where decisions are based on knowledge and every young person is allowed to challenge, be challenged, and lead. The manifesto addresses the question of ‘Why EIDM?’, and proposes solutions for improving education and the material conditions of Africa’s youth.

 

• Leveraging Best Practices to Design your Youth Participatory Action (YPAR) Research Project was created by a team of YPAR scholars and practitioners, who completed a review of the growing body of literature on YPAR in order to summarise the evidence into this useful resource. The guide contains their insights on adapting YPAR for young people of different ages; a checklist to design a YPAR project that meets the needs of youth; and YPAR resources to support your work.

 

• This blog titled Potential or essential? Youth as partners in education research is the first in a two-part series on centering youth in education research. It introduces the principles of youth-centred research principles, and explains why it is so important to adhere to all. The second blog, Handing over the mic: The difference between centering and giving youth  voices in research and practice, details how non-youth can move away from the narrative which leads to superficially ‘making space at the table’, and reconsider whether ‘the table’ is even the best forum to amplify youth voices.

 

• This infographic resource published by the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL  Program is about Including Youth Voice in Education: Partnering With Youth to Conduct Research. It illustrates how youth, whether acting as research participants, informants, or partners, can help education researchers uncover new insights and offer fresh perspectives.

 

• UNICEF’s hands-on toolkit Designing a Youth-Centred Journey to the Future was written for practitioners, and youth-focused and youth-led organisations to make foresight more accessible to young people, and help transfer power to them through meaningful engagement principles. Challenging the narrative that sees children and young people as beneficiaries of the world we create, this playbook offers a more inclusive way to engage youth as co-authors and co-owners in foresight and decision-making. 

 

• This report lays out the findings of the It’s Time to Talk! Children’s Views on Children’s Work project, launched by Kindernothilfe, Save the Children Canada, and Terre des Hommes International Federation. The project searchers for insights into the different reasons and motivations for children’s work; their likes and dislikes about work and working conditions; and how they felt different stakeholders could best support them. The project consulted 1,822 children aged 5 to 18 across 36 countries about their working lives. 

 

• Young Lives is a unique longitudinal study of poverty and inequality that has been following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam since 2001.