Mobilizing Communities to Support the Needs of Young People

As they prepare for adulthood, young men and women face important challenges, choices and responsibilities. Competing for schooling and jobs, overcoming unequal opportunities for women, adjusting to changes in traditional family structures, and dealing with reproductive health issues are among the biggest of these challenges. Broad support from their communities can be crucial in helping young people meet these life challenges.

The long-term success of interventions that target young people often depends on the backing of parents and influential members of the community, such as teachers and religious, cultural and other traditional leaders. This is especially true when interventions touch on issues of sexuality and reproductive health. These aspects of life are largely governed by communal norms and values. In programmes around the world, UNFPA attempts to mobilize communities to support a variety of activities to promote the health and well-being of young people.

Identifying community resources, concerns and solutions

Community mobilization requires an understanding of local concerns and dynamics. It typically begins by a participatory exercise in mapping community resources, identifying critical needs and generating solutions. These activities – used in conjunction with data from surveys and baseline studies – can provide critical information for shaping interventions, refining materials and for developing criteria with which to measure progress. The results can highlight issues that may not be obvious to an outsider.

For example, a mapping exercise in a UNFPA-supported project in Botswana, one of the countries hardest hit by the HIV epidemic, revealed that the community was urgently concerned not only with that disease, but also with teen pregnancy, rape, and alcohol and substance abuse among young people. The exercise also catalogued the challenges facing young people, including excess idle time, lack of recreational facilities, poor parent-child communication, lack of life planning skills and health services that were not welcoming to young people. With broad agreement on the issues of concern, the project was able to plan appropriate interventions.

Involving respected adults

UNFPA is working with parents and other respected members of communities to sensitize them to the needs of young people and to garner advice, support and leadership for responses to young people's needs. For instance:

• In Kenya, traditional elders have become a major force in the movement to eliminate female genital cutting, in part by promoting alternate rites of passage.

• In Mongolia, a distance-learning course is helping parents learn how to better communicate with young people.

• In Senegal, imams are speaking out against early marriage, and against behaviours that spread sexually transmitted diseases.

• In Guatemala, teachers, pupils and parents have collaborated on school curricula that build skills to improve the quality of family and social life.

• In Cambodia, monks, as well as parents, teachers and other community leaders are being educated about reproductive health issues, so that they will support a number of community-based initiatives in selected provincial capitals.

• In Bangladesh, in-laws are included in interventions to reduce resistance to contraception among young married couples.

Read more about projects that build supportive communities.

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