Community Based Family Planning Technical Update No. 7: Reaching Youth Through Community Strategies

This United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Technical Update discusses steps for designing community-based youth programmes, strategies to reach youth, and advantages of linking with larger community mobilisation efforts. Because the largest youth generation (aged 10 to 24) ever to transition to adulthood is the current youth population of 1.5 billion people, 1.3 billion of whom live in developing countries, the values, attitudes, and skills acquired by youth, according to the document, will have a long-term impact on the future. Strategies cited here are based on the assumption that achieving and measuring youth behaviour change, particularly on issues of sexuality and reproductive health, will have more impact if work is done with community involvement in community settings.

Steps for designing community-based programmes include:

1.  "Identify barriers to reaching youth. Have discussions with community leaders and gatekeepers to identify appropriate traditional networks for delivering an intervention that deals with sexual behavior and the best type of leaders to deliver the intervention.
   
2. Determine your program’s strengths and weaknesses. What components of your program address the concerns of your community members and which components prevent your program from being accepted within the community? Make sure you are reaching the right audience and engaging the right stakeholders to gain community investment for your program.
3. Design and implement programs that reach youth through the various strategies addressed below. When interventions include choosing community members as intervention leaders, focus on careful selection, training, and supervision. For broad community wide approaches a) identify activities with wide community appeal; b) choose timing and location to maximize reach and community participation; and c) advertise the activities in a way that make them accessible to community.
4. Work to ensure continued acceptance of and support for your interventions among gatekeepers. Develop strategies to deal with potential community backlash to program components."

Strategies for reaching youth through community members include the following:

• Involve youth themselves - Because youth experience different barriers to access and choice, their perspectives need to be included in programme interventions, e.g., as peer educators. "The Youth Peer Education Toolkit", a collaboration between Family Health International (FHI) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), explains how effective peer education programmes need to invest in evidence-based curricula, conduct adequate training, use programme management best practices, and regularly assess quality.

• Ensure that youth participation is authentic and meaningful. Examples of how to build partnerships between youth and adults can be found in "The Youth Participation Guide: Assessment, Planning, and Implementation". Work through existing youth-oriented organisations, centres, or infrastructures that are accepted by the community.

• Involve both genders. As an example, the Program H model developed in Brazil meets weekly with groups of young men to discuss gender, sexuality, and reproductive health; evaluations of the model have shown positive impact. Programmes can use the Gender Equitable Men (GEM) scale to measure changes in attitudes and behaviours.

• Involve parents. Programmes trying to reach youth should include supporting parents in their roles as caretakers. Use multiple channels of communication to reach parents by considering home visits, working with existing institutions such as schools and faith-based organisations, and employ special efforts to reach fathers. See "Helping Parents in Developing Countries Improve Adolescent Health" for more information.

• Involve religious leaders. Young people look to religious leaders for guidance on decision making. However, many faith leaders often do not address issues related to sexuality, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted infection (STI)/HIV prevention. As such, organisations should work with religious leaders to examine their role in sharing accurate information that will help youth make healthy decisions and to identify appropriate ways to discuss sexual and reproductive health. "Family Life Education: Faith-Based Tools for Working With Youth", an FHI/YouthNet document, provides training manuals and curricula for adults and youth to discuss family life education from both Christian and Muslim perspectives.

• Involve health care providers. Privacy, confidentiality, and provider attitudes towards serving young people are important dimensions of understanding young people’s experiences with health care providers. Save the Children in Guatemala used the "Partnership Defined Quality for Youth" manual to improve quality and availability of health services by holding discussion groups with youth and health care providers on these topics.

Community mobilisation, a capacity-building process through which individuals, groups, or organisations plan, carry out, and evaluate activities on a participatory and sustained basis, may be useful to help those involved reach youth. "The Community Action Cycle", described within a Kenya-based reproductive health project, can help communities define their health priorities, develop responses, take action, and evaluate their efforts. "Participatory Learning Assessment" can support evaluation of adolescent reproductive health concerns while also providing a platform for engaging community members.