Youth represent the world of tomorrow, and a heightening force in urban environments around the globe today. According to the UNFPA’s State of the World Population’s 2007 Youth Supplement, Growing Up Urban, “[t]he world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history.” Exciting opportunities face adolescents in urban centers.
There are higher concentrations of learning institutions and schools, increased access to health care, gateways to the Internet and global perspectives, and a wider variety of jobs, employment opportunities and paths to economic self-sufficiency. Government services and infrastructure – piped water, electricity, transportation, sewers, roads – offer chances to perhaps escape the poverty experienced in rural environs.
However, countless youths who pursue these hopes in cities often find themselves snared in a daunting reality. Education can become impossible to balance with earning money to pay rent, eat or support family. Health care may be far away or cost prohibitive. Affordable housing might be unsafe, unsanitary, temporary or non-existent. When well-paying jobs are outnumbered by those seeking them, young adults may pursue employment in the “informal sector,” opening them up to exploitation, abuse and unsafe working conditions. If no jobs can be found, men may turn to crime, women to transactional sex. All of these factors negatively impact adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Gender inequities boil to the surface as fertility rates in poorer populations spike. Young women find themselves coerced into sex, and at an increased risk for HIV, STIs and unwanted pregnancies – with feelings of no recourse, often unaware of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) resources – leading to a generation with limited options of breaking these cycles.
But hope is on the horizon. Social and behavior change communication (SBCC) has been identified as a successful strategy for reaching youth on SRH issues but programs targeted at urban youth face key challenges, such as social marginalization, a mobile population, informal settlements and violence and crime. Urban areas offer exciting and crucial opportunities, such as access to media, new technologies and high population-density.
Above image is from a poster published by Advocates for Youth: http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/component/content/article/1565-young-bl...
For research on SBCC for Urban Youth, go to the SBCC Research Synthesis page on Urban Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health
This website provides definitions and rationales behind common theories (i.e. social cognitive theory, stages of change theory) and approaches (i.e male involvement, service learning, youth development) used in developing adolescent pregnancy prevention programs.
Building upon a five-year evaluation of the After-School Initiative funded by The Colorado Trust, and evaluations of other youth-serving programs, the National Research Center, Inc created the Youth Outcome Toolkit as a comprehensive evaluation resource for programs serving youth.
This Toolkit is intended to guide humanitarian program managers and healthcare providers to ensure that sexual and reproductive health interventions put into place both during and after a crisis are responsive to the unique needs of adolescents.
This manual aims to develop awareness, reinforce knowledge and assist organizations designing, implementing or managing programs for children and youth affected by poverty and HIV/AIDS or other infections.
The sections of this toolkit are designed to help users increase knowledge of Emergency Contraception (EC) and stay up to date. They provide suggestions for increasing EC awareness in the workplace, whether it is a school district, a school, a school-based or school-linked health center, or a community-based organization.
This toolkit provides information to help urban youth workers get oriented to the topic of youth leadership development, offers examples of leading curricula, and includes forms that can be used in program evaluation. It includes links to project development tools, project implementation tools, and project evaluation tools.
This pathways model and set of indicators was developed by the Inter-Agency Working Group (IAWG) to more explicitly articulate the multiple roles that communities can play in addressing adolescent sexual and reproductive health issues.
This resource explains and is based on the Positive Youth Development approach to reaching youth. Positive Youth Development (PYD) is an active process which enables youth to reach their full potential by providing them with opportunities and experiences to be leaders and gain skills.
This resource seeks to increase the level of meaningful youth participation in programming at an institutional and programmatic level. The target audience includes senior and middle management, program managers, staff involved in implementing activities, and youth who may be engaged at all levels of an organization’s work.
This is a poster which accompanies the Youth Physical Activity Toolkit.
This TV spot is part of the Safe Love campaign, a comprehensive HIV prevention campaign that addresses key drivers of HIV/AIDS in Zambia, including multiple and concurrent sexual partnerships, low and inconsistent condom use, and mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
This TV spot is part of the Safe Love campaign, a comprehensive HIV prevention campaign that addresses key drivers of HIV/AIDS in Zambia, including multiple and concurrent sexual partnerships, low and inconsistent condom use, and mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
The toolkit can be used by anyone who promotes youth physical activity, including community leaders; physical education and health education teachers; physical activity coordinators at the school, district, and state levels; and physical activity practitioners working in health or community-based organizations.
This guide was primarily designed for boys and girls aged 10-14 from rural and urban areas of Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique and Rwanda.
The Ontario, Canada Ministry of Education initiated a Healthy School program to encourage all schools to promote good health habits among the students. This includes providing guidelines for good food, daily physical activity and a healthy environment that supports learning and growth as vital to helping students reach their full potential.
The Gender Roles, Equality and Transformations (GREAT) Project works to improve gender equity and reproductive health in Northern Uganda.
The “Healthy Living Champions” Award is given to elementary schools in Middlesex-London for their outstanding commitment to physical activity and healthy eating using the “Foundations for a Healthy School” model.
This package describes the criteria and rules for the “Healthy Living Champions” Award which is given to elementary schools in Middlesex-London for their outstanding commitment to physical activity and healthy eating using the “Foundations for a Healthy School” model.
This is a brief 45 minute lesson plan designed to help link young men and women, ages 15-19, to trusted, "teen friendly" contraceptive and reproductive healthcare providers.
This workbook provides activities to help students prevent new HIV infections and gain skills related to coping with all aspects of HIV and AIDS. Gaining this knowledge and these skills can help students live a healthy lifestyle, complete a basic education, and consequently reach their potential to attain their life goals.
Street Smart is an intensive HIV/AIDS and STD prevention program for youth whose behaviors place them at risk of becoming infected. Life circumstances define risk for some youth; being runaway or homeless, gay, or a sex offender increases the potential for risky behavior.
This manual is part of a program called Y2Y (Youth to Youth), designed for youth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Y2Y is a comprehensive program that addresses HIV/AIDS and sexual and reproductive health issues among young people aged 10-24 using a peer to peer approach.
This comic book is designed to foster positive attitudes and perspectives that will help youth consider the quality of relationships they make, and make safe sexual choices to prevent HIV and early pregnancy, fight gender discrimination and violence, and encourage involvement of parents in the lives of their children.
This is a six episode online comic strip about teens Christy, Diana, John, and their friends – about how they make sexual and reproductive choices.
mCenas! seeks to identify and address myths and misconceptions related to family planning among the youth in Mozambique and deliver that information via mobile phones. The content includes role model stories and informational messages short message service (SMS) messages sent to youth aged 15-24 to address family planning access and uptake.
This website is made possible by the support of the American People through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Breakthrough-ACTION Project, supported by USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau for Global Health, under Cooperative Agreement #AID-OAA-A-17-00017 with the Johns Hopkins University.
Breakthrough-ACTION is based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs (JHU∙CCP). The contents of this website are the sole responsibility of JHU∙CCP. The information provided on this website is not official U.S. Government information and does not necessarily represent the views or positions of USAID, the United States Government, or The Johns Hopkins University.