Although in the past the field of youth development has been subsumed within or occluded by other traditional development sectors such as education, a re-emerging emphasis on security in US government foreign assistance has tended to foreground youth as a frame of reference for international development programming and public diplomacy. While youth as security threat is by itself a reductive formulation, there are opportunities to grasp more deeply the power of young cohorts to affect social change in multidimensional ways. This article examines how youth issues have been framed within broader policy and program priorities of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), especially in post-conflict/fragile states, in an effort to illuminate some key dilemmas and knowledge gaps.
Language and practices associated with democracy and multipartyism are used by practitioners of the gurna society among the Tupuri of northern Cameroon to comment on local changes in gurna dances and their attending social values. At the heart of this commentary is a widely‐shared anxiety about moral standards for political action and the threat of factionalism, as well as nostalgia for unity among dancers and in society at large. This appropriation of a nationallevel lexicon enabled practitioners of an ostensibly “traditional” institution to revitalize their practice and comment on the broader political life of the nation.
In recent years the international youth development field has increasingly acknowledged that purposeful action at the systems level is critical for achieving positive outcomes for youth, sustainably, equitably, and at scale. In 2018 a group of international organizations formed the Youth Systems Collaborative, a community of practice whose aim is to promote international learning on youth systems change efforts. Building from the collective learning of this group, this paper offers a framework for understanding how widespread and sustained positive youth development outcomes can be achieved in low- and middle-income countries. Five enablers that advance systems change are presented: stakeholder collaboration; vision and goals; systems mapping; data, evaluation, and learning; and capacity development, as well as 4 domains within which system change occurs: policies, services and practices, norms and mindsets, and resource flows. Each of these 9 dimensions is illustrated with lessons learned from both U.S. and international youth systems change efforts. The paper concludes with a call to action for diverse system actors to apply these lessons as they support youth to reach their full potential.
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