Global Youth-Led Development Report Series - Report 3 - Experiences and Lessons from the Urban Youth Fund Grantees in Africa and Asia

This report is the third volume the Global Youth-Led Development Series, a collection of themed papers created to expand the knowledge in the area of youth-led development. Youth-led development (YLD) is a term first popularized by organizations such as Peacechild International to reflect a faith in the power of young people to contribute constructively to the good of society. YLD places youth at the centre of their own and their communities’ development, moving youth from passive receptors of development, to agents of positive change. Building on Peacechild’s definition, UN-Habitat in 2005 published a report leading up to the World Urban Forum in Vancouver, which looked at YLD as practiced by youth-led agencies. This report was a critical step in building an evidentiary base for YLD, as it focused on self-organized youth, and explored how these YLD agencies can become more than the sum of their parts through collective action. The report’s conclusions became part of the basis for UN-Habitat’s development of new YLD programmes, supported by the Government of Norway. In 2007, UN-Habitat convened representatives from its four One Stop Resource Youth Resource Centres based in East Africa to identify principles and promising practices for YLD. This report presents preliminary findings from 13 Urban Youth Fund grantees from Africa and Asia and the Pacific region. The grantees include 8 youth-led organizations from Africa and 6 grantees from the Asia and Pacific. The report was compiled to provide basic guidance to the Urban Youth Fund program and to share experiences, lessons and recommendations through the Global Youth Help Desk and the Global Youth Research Network. Assessment of the Urban Youth Fund grantees presented in this report is guided by the following research questions: - To what extent is the Urban Youth Fund generating decent and sustainable jobs for urban youth? - What, if anything, is the role of the Urban Youth Fund in generating and strengthening local partnerships and capacity building for urban youth employment creation? - How has the Fund, if at all, impacted youth directly?