Youth

Young people have the right to be at the table when decisions are made that affect them. It helps to ensure sustainable development when the solutions are found together with the young people for whom the solutions must work.

We see and work actively with young people as a group with great diversity across identities, gender, sexuality, age and resources.

Why do we work with a focus on young people?

Young people are our main target group because, due to their age, they rarely have a decisive voice in societal and political decisions, but are often in a life situation with great responsibility for their own and sometimes others´ - children´s, siblings´, parents´ - future.

At the same time, historically, young people are the ones who dare to stand up for social change. They have a massive and often unseen potential for change. We work to bring out the potential of young people and for young people's voices are being heard and respected when it comes to freedom to choose how they want to live their sexual life and what consequences it should have, for example when it comes to contraception, partners and parenting.

We work in countries where a historically large proportion of the population are young people, and therefore it is extra important that we have an increased focus on young people in our work. In Africa overall, 19% of the population was between 15 and 25 years old in 2015 and 41% of the population was under 15 years old. With such a large group of young people, it is fundamental that we engage young people in securing their rights and opportunities. The alternative is to leave a whole generation of young people with fewer opportunities, in greater poverty and unemployment.

If you don't have access to sex education, contraception, HIV tests and skills to communicate with your partner, friends and parents about questions about gender and sexuality, it is difficult to make the choices needed to, for example, complete an education .

Among young women under the age of 19 in Uganda for example, who are sexually active, 10% have access to contraception, 25% become pregnant before they turn 19, and 6% of women and 8% of men complete a secondary education. In order to give young women and men the opportunity to make choices about how their lives will shape up, we need to understand and acknowledge the context they live in. Specifically, it is about examining what information is made available for young people, how and for whom it is possible to gain access to it and which norms may challenge young people's access to their basic rights.

How do we work with young people?

When we work with young people in practice, we generally focus on four things that are central to young people's lives, for better or worse: 1) sexuality, 2) social norms, 3) young people as agents of change and 4) digitalization and technology.

Sexuality

Through partnerships with local organizations, we provide sexuality education to young people in the Global South. This happens through:

Young-to-young teaching in youth centres, on market places, school visits, visits to workplaces, etc. The teachers are trained in inclusive and interactive teaching methods, in sexual and reproductive health, in legislation and rights and much more. The teachers help to plan and revise the activities and at the same time are trained in democratization processes and co-determination.

School-based sex education. We collaborate with education authorities on upskilling teachers in youth education to be able to deliver good and rights-based sex education based on the legislation in the country. This of course demands a lot of our methods and materials, as the legislation differs from country to country, the teachers' knowledge and capacity are fluctuating, and a large part of the schools are religiously based, private schools.

Influence of political and administrative frameworks for sex education. Through our work, we present analyzes of challenges surrounding sex education or the lack thereof and solutions for politicians and decision-makers. Through cooperation with the authorities, we address the need to recognize young people as sexual beings as well as the societal norms that help to maintain high numbers of unwanted pregnancies among teenagers, unsafe abortions and a low completion of youth education.

Social norms

We are aware that young people are part of the society and culture they were brought up in. It is important that young people themselves get the knowledge and tools to be able to deal with it in relation to what they would like to be able to achieve in their lives. Just as the recognition that sexuality is part of young people's lives, it is important to recognize that different social, cultural or religious environments have a great influence on norms around young people's sexual activity and sexuality. In most of the countries we work, young people's sexuality is stigmatized. That is why we work both with prominent people such as politicians and musicians, with authorities, with parents and with young people to create knowledge and insight and initiate dialogue across generations. If we do not change the framework around the reason why young people become unwanted pregnant, why they do not visit a health clinic, why they die from unsafe abortions, or why they drop out of school, we leave all the responsibility to the young people alone.

Young people as agents of change:

Young people are the ones who know the most about their own lives, experience and challenges, and they have the dreams and the solutions. Our projects must be the framework that enables them to analyse, argue for and act on these. We equip young people to be able to engage in dialogue with decision-makers and politicians, with parents and local leaders, and we open doors for young people to enter the spaces where real society-changing decisions are made. The young people gain knowledge and tools and have an ongoing dialogue with our partners' employees about the role of change agent. It deals e.g. about how to talk about sex education in, for example, Kenya.

Young people are helping to push cultural and social norms. This also happens through young-to-younger education, through the young people's social network and in their daily dialogue with their parents. We support the young - i.a. together with youth organizations – by having a parallel dialogue with authorities, health personnel and parents. We take responsibility for ensuring that societal changes are not solely the responsibility of the young people themselves.