with youth co-assessors
The Panos London approach was based on evidence that learning and participation are the foundations of positive, inclusive organisational development and equitable social change, successful and effective programming, accountability and value for money.3 Substantive
participation of young people and Member Association staff in countries contributed to strengthening their reflection, evaluative thinking and their capacity to analyse and use data for planning and action. The process of this assessment contributed to building safe spaces, trust and on-going dialogue, to drive planning and suggest improvements for implementation strategies.
Youth co-assessors4 in the country case studies determined the issues which they researched and how they wished to present their stories. Telling the story of the A+ project from the perspective of young people who were directly involved, resulted in a different and critical perspective that could not be gained from carrying out research with adults and staff and from documents. The approach was sensitive to power relations in the local context, as well as power dynamics in the assessments themselves.
Overview of the workshop with young people and meeting with other stakeholders
The main means for involving young people in the assessment was through a five-day workshop carried out at one of the A+ project sites (see also section 5). ABPF selected a team of six young women and four young men, all of whom were involved in the A+ project as peer educators or agents social,5 to be trained as co-assessors, as well as to be key informants themselves for the assessment. Most of the participants were aged in their early- to mid-20s; the youngest was 16 years and the eldest was 25 years. One participant was the national spokesperson for the ABPF Youth Action Movement (YAM). They were all in formal education. Their involvement in the Youth Action Movement, as peer educators, varied from 18 months to seven years.
The workshop took place in Lokossa, one of four sites where the A+ project was implemented. Five of the young people were from the three other sites (Savalou, Parakou and Porto Novo) and five were from Lokossa. Throughout the week, they worked in groups that mixed the peer educators from Lokossa with those from the other sites.
In the first two days of the workshop,6 the youth researchers, working in groups, thought through and discussed a series of questions:
Why they do what they do?
What are their goals as young people committed to sexual and reproductive health and rights?
What is the world they would like to live in?
How are their activities helping to achieve that world?
What are the challenges they face?
how can they address them?
how can others address them?
7
Ethical research covers how to represent people’s perspectives with dignity, and how to get the stories and interviews they would like in the time that they have available.
A+ project stories of change
The young co-assessors chose three main themes they wanted to explore in more detail, which they felt told the A+ project story of change:
Why we do what we do: A day in the life of a peer educator
Young people cannot afford services
Engaging partners and local actors to support sexual and reproductive health services for young people
They received training on how to conduct ethical research7 and interview their peers and other members of the community in different situations. This included discussing how to represent people’s perspectives with dignity.
They learned how to give informed consent to their participation in the assessment and consent to their evidence being used. Ethical research training also covered the need to get verbal consent from other participants in gathering evidence for their photo stories and how to document the consent they received from people they photographed and interviewed. They were trained on how to use cameras and compose photo stories, including how to work in a participatory way with their peers and with other people in the community, using photography to collect evidence and create photo stories.
The young people then spent two days collecting data, guided by the interviewing and data collection training.
While youth co-assessors were collecting their evidence and creating their stories of change, the A+ assessor visited a number of stakeholders in Lokassa to collect other perspectives about the A+ project, including a school headmistress and other school staff, a religious leader and head of a partner non-governmental organisation. She also visited Porto Novo, where she met with the agent social and A+ project peer educators and learned more about how the A+ project has been implemented in a more urban context.
In the post-data collection analysis session on the final day, the youth co-assessors prepared PowerPoint presentations of their photo stories and presented them to the other workshop participants. The young people then discussed the stories, drawing out themes from the stories. They reflected on others’ perspectives of their own stories and analysed together the information they had gathered.
Then, the Panos London assessor and co-facilitator worked with the young people to co-produce an overall presentation. The youth co-assessors presented their stories to the local agent social in
Lokassa and to representatives from ABPF’s head office. The co-created presentation ensured that the voices, knowledge and findings from the youth co-assessors were conveyed directly and in the correct context to other stakeholders.
The Panos London assessor used this co-created presentation to present the young people’s research in discussions with ABPF staff at the head office and to the IPPF Regional Office staff.
Youth assessors learning how to use cameras, Benin
8
WHO (n.d.) Benin Country Profile. Geneva: WHO Department of Making Pregnancy Safer. http://www.afro.who. int/en/clusters-a-programmes/frh/ making-pregnancy-safer/mps-country- profiles.html
9
This refers to all young women who have been pregnant, regardless of whether the pregnancy resulted in child birth or was terminated through miscarriage or induced abortion. 10
Population Council (2009). The Adolescent Experience In-Depth: Using data to Identify and Reach the Most Vulnerable Young People, Benin 2006. Data, Tables, Graphs and Maps based on the Demographic and Health Surveys. New York: Population Council and UNFPA. 11
Gender sensitive means that the data were disaggregated by sex and social and structural drivers of gendered inequality were explicitly analysed, for example, early marriage, schooling, living with parents and pregnancy.