The Communication Initiative
Development action with informed and engaged societies
The Communication Initiative
After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future.
 
Co-founder Victoria Martin is pleased to see this work continue under Wits' leadership. Victoria knows that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction.
 
We honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades. Meanwhile, La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA) continues independently at cila.comminitcila.com and is linked with The CI Global site.
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On the COVID-19 Pandemic Frontlines

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Summary

"Through this paper, the IFRC encourages continuous fine-tuning and recalibration of youth engagement strategies and programming..."

By exploring the broader context, introducing conceptual theories of human behaviour, and featuring the realities of lives of children, adolescents, and young adults, this discussion paper offers a mapping and analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of youth development. It challenges the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and its partner humanitarian agencies to better explore synergies between youth engagement and various programmatic areas of humanitarian aid and development, especially in the design and delivery of interventions and programmes. It also provides a compendium of resources and a curated list of multilingual and operational tools to help improve youth engagement strategies and programming during COVID-19 and beyond.

The "Setting the Scene" and "Dynamics of the Pandemics" chapters place the situation of children, adolescents, and young adults experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic in a wider societal context. These sections are designed to help the reader distinguish between youth-specific and overall phenomena, as well as to understand the overarching principles and drivers of human behaviour and decision-making in pandemics. These chapters also cover key concepts and paradigms relevant in national-level partnerships for COVID-19 youth-led and society-owned programming. Lastly, the sample of global data may guide National Societies in their search for locally relevant evidence.

The next 10 chapters explore the realities of youth during the COVID-19 pandemic across themes such as mental health, the climate crisis, vaccination, trust, child labour, education, health, poverty, and race. The primary purpose of these chapters is to document the multifaceted impact of COVID-19 on youth and to help practitioners understand the complexity of the situations youth find themselves in during the pandemic. Evidence-based and analytical content points out lessons learned from the past and their pertinency to today's situation in the domain of youth programming and youth development. This content is positioned in the context of the key IFRC principles of meaningful youth engagement, so that areas of possible synergies with potential partners are highlighted. Namely, one of the chapters explores Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) principles of meaningful youth engagement, offering:

  • Recommendations for governments and public authorities:
    • Ensure the representation of young people on central decision-making forums and committees overseeing the management of the pandemic at a government level, and engage young people directly in evidence gathering, analysis, dialogue, planning and the formulation of national recovery plans.
    • Review the representation of young people on established national or regional youth democratic participatory structures, with a view to ensuring they actively reflect the diversity of the populations they purport to serve, and take action to draw membership from grassroots organisations and groups, including those that work with vulnerable or marginalised young people.
    • Establish national minimum standards (setting out and ensuring effective communication of young people's educational entitlements during the COVID-19 pandemic and minimum requirements for schools), establish monitoring mechanisms, and consider instituting new policies or legislative measures, where necessary, to ensure standards are met.
    • Independently evaluate schools' responses to the COVID-19 crisis, determining the range of measures taken and their effectiveness; appraise the relative effectiveness of educational, welfare, and safeguarding measures adopted during the crisis; and publish and disseminate the findings.
    • Review the availability of and access to mental health and well-being services for young people in a post-COVID-19 context, including consideration of the role and capacity of school-based counselling and therapeutic services and support, and share good practices regarding online support for mental health and well-being.
  • Recommendations for the education community, youth organisations, and service providers:
    • Review and strengthen forums for engaging young people in school or organisational planning and decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that mechanisms for decision-making are inclusive and that these forums actively reflect the diversity of the populations they purport to serve.
    • Ensure the full transparency of decisions taken by school or organisational leadership regarding access, quality, and inclusion in school education during the COVID-19 pandemic, and set out a service charter, or equivalent, formalising schools' commitments to ensuring that young people's right to quality education is upheld.
    • Facilitate young people to create and oversee peer support and self-help forums about coping and thriving during lockdown, such as study groups, well-being support, and service-user forums.
  • Recommendations for the media: Redress imbalances in the portrayal of young people during the pandemic, feature more young people in journalistic and reporting roles, ensure greater visibility of young people from diverse ages and backgrounds, and celebrate young people's civic and social actions during the pandemic through personal stories.

On a related note, the chapter "Humanitarian Excellence 2030: With and For Youth" presents transformative policy recommendations and calls for tangible action going forward in order to:

  • Address developmental roadblocks hindering the well-being of youth and meaningful youth engagement during the pandemic - For example, action is needed to build competencies in youth engagement, inclusiveness, holistic community resilience strengthening, and social capital generation. Key players and decision-making agencies influencing the lives of young people need to tap into the expert pools of civil society partners that have these competencies. Also, IFRC calls on global stakeholders to increase of the number of young professional employees with experience in community engagement and diversity programming. Such expertise can support messaging that is empowering, tailored to intended audience(s), and informed by both grassroots engagement practitioners and behaviour change theories.
  • Accelerate localisation and wide ownership of solutions tailored for youth constituency - For example, IFRC urges senior public health officials and respected positional and non-positional leaders to disseminate positive narratives about how crucial the vaccination of young people is for the whole community. Partnerships need to be urgently forged to ensure that children, adolescents, and young adults have easy access to youth-friendly information and services. Similarly, evidence-based and local needs-driven advocacy and awareness-raising initiatives co-created with youth must be promoted locally and globally.
  • Elevate well-being and protection as key pillars of youth engagement - For example, finding that culturally entrenched taboos, such as those around mental health and well-being, can be broken in times of crisis, IFRC urges RCRC programmes to engage children, adolescents, and young adults in child rights, child protection, and mental health and well-being programmes and advocacy efforts.
  • Nurture youth-led influence and impact - For example, IFRC calls on decision-makers to celebrate individual and collective success of young people while establishing opportunities for young champions and youth pioneering teams to connect and network with their "non-champion" peers. IFRC also urges youth engagement experts to promote youth engagement resources and technical guidance as knowledge-rich tools to be used by professionals in charge of thematic humanitarian projects.

The final substantive chapter features a compendium of multilingual resources to support National Societies in enriching their activities with and for young people during the pandemic. Resources featured in this section are organised in subcategories: young people as frontliners, youth-friendly mental health and psychosocial support resources, domestic and gender-based violence, child safeguarding and protection, education, and fighting misinformation. The compendium ends with a list of principal RCRC and major partner e-hubs for humanitarian operations and programming in the COVID-19 pandemic.

IFRC hopes that the paper will serve as an evidence-based advocacy and operational resource for National Societies, regional RCRC youth networks, and the IFRC Secretariat to influence policy and decisionmakers to invest in and initiate youth-friendly, youth-driven, and society-owned solutions to improve the lives of children, adolescents, and young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Web link
Click here in order to download the discussion paper in various languages.
Source

IFRC website, August 19 2021. Image credit: © IFRC