Youth Empowerment Activity (YEA)
Objectives
The overall goal of Youth Empowerment Activity project is, Youth gain the knowledge and apply the skills they need to lead productive lives, gain employment, and positively contribute to their communities.
To achieve this, the project seeks to accomplish a combination of four objective areas briefly described below:
- OBJECTIVE 1 - SKILLS: Access to functional literacy, numeracy, soft and life skills (including social emotional skills and wellbeing) programs for vulnerable and marginalized out-of-school youth increased
Expected outcomes
- Enhanced readiness of young people to engage in sustainable livelihood activities.
- Youth trained apply literacy and numeracy skills in their daily activities.
- Instructors and facilitators use improved methods/skills to deliver their training.
- Youth suffering from significant adverse experiences or marginalized backgrounds practice socio-emotional, coping, and problem-solving skills.
- OBJECTIVE 2 - INCOME: Entrepreneurial, employment and vocational opportunities for youth expanded. Entrepreneurial and vocational training plays an important role in providing alternative, and often more effective, pathways to acquiring skills, learning and employment, especially in the context of a fragile setting.
Expected outcomes
- Improved youth access to market-driven products and services that can enhance their income opportunities or that of their households.
- Trained youth apply their knowledge and skills to create small-scale enterprises or cooperatives.
- Private vocational training institutions provide demand-driven, relevant and employable skills to learners.
- OBJECTIVE 3 - HEALTH: Foster behavior change among youth to make positive adolescent reproductive health choices and cultivate equitable gender norms. During this phase, adolescents establish patterns of behavior, for instance, related to diet, physical activity, substance use, and sexual activity that can protect their health and the health of others around them and partly determines how productive they are in their communities.
Expected outcomes
- Improved parenting and family communication skills for strengthened intra-family support.
- Reduced adolescent pregnancies in targeted communities.
- Increased female participation in household-level decision-making processes.
- OBJECTIVE 4 – YOUTH CONTRIBUTIONS: Improved social cohesion among youth and their communities by supporting safe spaces for productive and civic engagement activities. South Sudanese youth are often excluded from public dialogues and decision-making processes impacting them and their community development. Idle youth are denied their ability to build social skills and healthy community values because of limited opportunities for social engagement. This situation often leads to deterioration of social cohesion and development of negative community perceptions of youth.
Expected outcomes
- Inter- and intra-community social bonding among youth strengthened.
- Increased capacity for youth-responsive services.
- Improved civic participation by young people in community development.
- Increased use of safe spaces by youth to share and promote positive development values.
- Improved safe public spaces for youth.
