In 2022, Power to You(th) Ghana successfully launched and executed an innovative initiative, dubbed ”the Youth Initiative Small Grants (YISG)”. This initiative is born out of the quest to operationalize the core principle of Meaningful and Inclusive Youth Participation into programming – it allows women- and youth-led groups in their natural stages to identify trending societal issues and then develop and implement tailored interventions with support from the grant to change the situation..
During its first phase of implementation, the YISG strategy provided financial and technical support to ten groups within the programme scope to catalyze their interventions around
progressive social norms. After careful assessment and a process of co-creation, the sub-grantees advanced into various project designs as highlighted below:
- A network of young women conducted a scoping study among various
development actors on youth-inclusive programming. - Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW) enhanced their skills on the
production of re-usable sanitary kits. - AGYW living with disability publicly discussed their barriers in accessing
(reproductive) health services. - School girls clubs organized community exhibitions to engage local duty bearers
and community members on Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV). - Community change agents led strategic reviews of widowhood rites and possible
harmful effects.
During the first phase of piloting, the ten YISG grantees directly reached out to over 27,000 persons and extended the programme implementation from the original 40 communities to 60 communities, hence adding 20 communities to the programme scale.
Making use of innovative approaches, the YISG grantees documented some major outcomes on the Ghana PtY programme. As a result of lobbying efforts, 18 young people entered community health management committees to take part in decisions around adolescent health. Another grantee influenced the successful reporting and prosecution of a perpetrator of defilement through on-going school sensitizations. A campaign against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a harmful practice eventually influenced the decision of a former practitioner to renounce the practice and publicly declare herself a champion against FGM.
The concept of YISG is highly adaptive to different contexts and promotes local ownership for sustainability. It establishes sustainable community structures and enhances a strong civic space
to initiate and support social transformation. It directly speaks to the four core principles under the PtY programme;
Meaningful and Inclusive Youth Participation and Engagement
The YISG strategy encourages young people to take a leading role in the design, implementation, and evaluation of projects. Since the grantees are preferably youth-led, the voices of young people are shaping the whole process from planning to execution of activities. Furthermore, all project interventions are targeted towards Adolescent Girls and Young Women from less privileged backgrounds. Because the YISG strategy combines a wide variety of different approaches, it comes up strong in consciously reaching out to beneficiaries out of school, survivors of unintended pregnancies and people living with disability among others.
Southern Leadership
The YISG strategy works with local groups and networks in their organic state, with less or no systems in place. With their ideas in context, the programme then co-creates and shapes their ideas and activities to respond to the programme’s key issues. To further enhance this and MIYPE, the Ghana programme brought on board a young person from one of these networks (youth movement) to serve on the country management.
Partnership
Core of the YISG strategy is to establish a mutual partnership between sub-grantees and the programme with linking and learning opportunities for both; the YISG grantees contribute to the overall project success while benefiting from financial and technical support. The strategy further strengthens partnerships within the PtY country consortium, since it leverages on the organizational strengths of each consortium partner.
Innovation and scale
The YISG strategy emerges as a model to consciously scale up the programme outreach and coverage. The diversity of project initiatives is ideal to close implementation gaps, complement existing programme actions or even broaden the scope.