By conducting a youth audit, donor agencies are applying a mechanism that will enable them to track and evaluate the ‘value added’ of working with and for young people over time. This internal data is often not recorded.

In 2009 UNFPA Nepal began the process of developing their country-level strategy for young people. This began with making an assessment of how they are currently engaging youth, both through their programmes and also within the organisation. The Youth Guidance Project (YGP) team assisted with this initial audit by developing a questionnaire. The UN Country Team (UNCT) and UNFPA then assisted the Nepal United Nations Youth Advisory Panel (UNYAP) to develop a more detailed assessment tool, referred to as a youth scorecard. The UNYAP is advocating use of the youth scorecard as a standard guideline for UN country teams in Nepal to develop a co-ordinated country youth action strategy.

Problems addressed

• Organisations seeking to deepen their work with youth need to assess their own internal systems as well as their programmes.
• There is currently a lack of audit tools for assessing the status of youth and youth issues within UN organisations, which is crucial in a country where one third of Nepal’s population is aged 10 to 24.

Objectives

• To enable organisations to understand and analyse their current efforts with young people.
• To involve staff in reflection about the potential for youth engagement.
• To start viewing youth as a cross-cutting issue for the organisation, and to consider mainstreaming.

Youth as beneficiaries

Audit findings indirectly impact on all young people reached by the organisation’s work.

Youth as partners

Twelve young people between the ages of 19 and 29 (from UNYAP) helped to design, review and pilot the scorecard, making shared decisions with adults. Young women were included on this team, including those from underrepresented ethnic groups.

Process

• The scorecard was developed by UNYAP and the UNFPA youth programme officer. It was based on IPPF standards, the YGP questionnaire and UN gender scorecard.
• To ensure the practicality of the tool, in November 2009 UNFPA supported two UNYAP members to conduct a district level pilot in Dang, a district in midwestern Nepal.
• In Dang they visited 10 village development committees and interacted with the young girls from UNFPA’s Choose your Future classes, young people and peer educators from local youth clubs/organisations and the youth wing of the Family Planning Association of Nepal.
• The young evaluators also visited local children from child clubs that are supported by UNICEF’s Decentralised Action for Children and Women Programme and residents who have been trained by and benefited from UNDP’s Micro-Enterprise Development Programme in Dang.
• Findings will be presented to UNCT for endorsement of the tool as a standard guideline, and to feed into UNFPA’s annual workplan process for 2010.

Results

• UNFPA Nepal felt this was an effective way to assess the organisation’s current youth efforts and start the process of developing youth strategies.
• Local level government: acknowledged the audit as “an effective way to gather youth opinions from the grassroots level.”
• Perceptions of young people were changed, particularly among district and local government officials.

“The assessment triggered our thoughts and reflected the true level of youth engagement in UNFPA Nepal’s work. This assessment also helped us reinforce the message of meaningful youth engagement in our work by making us rethink the notion of youth participation and its position within the organisation.” Aradhana Gurung-Shrestha, UNFPA Nepal

Lessons learned

• Different organisations are engaging young people at varying levels, which necessitates the use of different audit tools. UNFPA found it useful to use the YGP questionnaire to conduct a quick broad assessment, and then go on to understand the more detailed picture of their engagement with youth through the youth scorecard.
• It is useful from an advocacy point of view to have young people implementing the scorecard, and for staff at senior levels to commit to it.
• The scorecard is a useful mechanism for supporting organisational change processes, where there is commitment and value placed upon using a participatory approach.

Potential challenges

• Securing adequate staff time for reflection and response; this necessitates support at senior levels.
• Getting staff to be honest and open about their efforts, successes and challenges.
• Ensuring organisational commitment to act on findings and recommendations.

For further information contact:

UNFPA Nepal, http://nepal.unfpa.org/en/index.php