A Perspective on Working with Youth

Every Youth A Jagrik, Every Space Nurturing Jagriks – From Reaping Demographic Dividend to Sowing Demographic Multipliers

“If I had size 10 shoes, would you take them just because I am giving them to you? No! Not unless you have size 10 feet and even then, it would depend on whether you like that style, whether you need them if they are the right color, and so on… Most of the youth programmes extended to us are like these size 10 shoes. You expect us to engage because you made them, and you want to give them to us. Please do not give us more size 10 shoes!”

Demographic Dividend or Demographic Disaster?

India is home to a fifth of the world’s youth demographic,¹ with nearly 40% of our population between 13–35 years.² Currently, our median age is 28 years, which means that the working-age population in India is far greater than the non-working-age population, hence creating the window for the demographic dividend. This window, however, is closing. According to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPi), by 2031, our median age will become 31. After that the proportion of young people in the Indian population will go down, indicating a pattern of aging. Some states have already started showing signs of aging, like Kerala, while others like Bihar will have a larger window for this dividend.³

We must unpack what we mean by this Demographic dividend. Demographic dividend, as defined by the United Nations Population Fund, is “the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population’s age structure, mainly when the share of the working-age population is larger than the non-working-age share of the population”. We often miss the nuance in the definition. It talks about ‘potential’. An increased population of young people does not necessarily and automatically mean economic growth. As we are all well aware, unemployment rates are incredibly high, even as multiple industries lament the lack of a skilled workforce.

Sowing Demographic Multipliers: The Need of the Hour

The skills that the industries looking towards the future need are essential leadership and life capacities like decision making, conflict resolution, collaboration, and leveraging diversity, among others. Add to that the number of crises we face in this era, from climate change to inequity and injustice, identity-based conflicts, health crises, and so on. All of these require a generation of value-based, compassionate, self-aware, systems thinking, and skilled entrepreneurial leaders across sectors who work with the constitutional values of justice, equality, liberty, and fraternity as their north stars.

We need this new generation of young people to be able to find collaborative, contextual, and sustainable solutions to complex issues. They need to innovate and be creative while constantly learning in a global atmosphere where change is rapid and constant. We need these young leaders to take ownership of themselves, the community, and the larger society, irrespective of the sector they choose to work in, to build a strong Nation. We need them to become ‘Jagriks’ (jagruk + nagrik) or self-awakened, empowered, proactive citizens. The investment we make in young people today will be a critical determinant of whether we reap a dividend or be burdened by a liability. At ComMutiny – The Youth Collective,⁴ VartaLeap Coalition⁵ and Pravah,⁶ we believe that we need to shift the narrative from ‘reaping the demographic dividend to sowing demographic multipliers’. While the dividend perspective looks at youth as assets to be invested in for the economy and society’s benefit, the multiplier implies creating conditions and spaces where the young can multiply their potential to transform their lives as well as the lives of the larger communities.

Shifting the Needle: Reaping Demographic Dividend to Sowing Demographic Multipliers

With the tectonic shifts that are being experienced especially by the young people in the world, we need to focus on sustainable youth development. We must nurture social hope by enabling the young people to become jagriks and strengthen youth development and youth engaging organisations across sectors to design and facilitate effective journeys through which we can co-create social change that keeps alive the constitutional values.

To make this a reality, though, all of us across sectors and organisations need to engage with and invest in young people by understanding and working ‘with’ them, rather than cast them in a mould of our making. In India, the youth are not a homogenous group. Caste, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and region, among others, play a huge role in the context of a young person and their needs and wants. A cookie-cutter approach to youth programming does not work in such a scenario. A programme can have a broader universal framework but must have space for contextualisation based on the context of the youth.

Lenses of Youth Work

The work with young people can be categorised under different lenses.⁷ For instance, the economistic lens looks at young people as potential Human Resources as well as consumers and markets in creating a robust Indian economy. The protectionist lens focuses on the issues and problems of being young – substance abuse, health issues, etc. and sees them as beneficiaries of interventions. The social dividend lens,⁸ or youth for development lens looks at using the heart, hands, and feet of the young people for furthering their cause – whether it be a developmental campaign or a political rally, the focus is on how we can use the ‘energy’ of young people for our agendas.

While the intent behind all of the above three lenses may be positive towards engaging young people, they may miss the critical aspect of changing the aspirations and psychological development of young people. That is why we need the fourth lens, the youth development or youth-centric development lens. This focuses as much on the transformation of young people as on transforming the world through them. This lens helps them reflect on how the world is changing them even as they change the world. This psycho-social-economic lens is not just focussed on what society needs from young people but is centered around the needs, aspirations, and anxieties of young people. It places the young person at the centre and sees them as partners in impacting the world and unlocking their potential as human beings. The youth-centric lens can work as a lever and a catalyst to meet the goals of the other three lenses in a more sustainable and impactful way.

We have seen this time and again in our work at ComMutiny and its 100+ adolescent and youth engaging member organisations pan-India and in Pravah. Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) and health programmes for adolescents are adopted more easily by young people when the youth-centric approach is used. When the young people come on board as partners, they have greater ownership and clarity on what would help the programme serve them best, rather than when they are solely seen as beneficiaries on the receiving end of a top-down health initiative. We are therefore increasingly seeing many more conversations on adolescent and youth agency, decision-making capacities, and peer-led models, when we talk about adolescent health, menstrual health, and SRHR youth programming. All these aspects are seen as an integral part of a successful programme and give due respect to adolescents and youth as equal stakeholders.

Design Principles for a Youth-centric Development Approach

How can organisations and youth facilitators adopt this youth development approach? ComMutiny, VartaLeap Coalition⁵ and Pravah have emerged with a set of 7 design principles for youth-centric work. These principles have been shared nationally and internationally at numerous fora and have resonated across the board with practitioners. The principles take into account an understanding of youthhood and essential learning principles for young people. Adopting these principles whilst designing and facilitating youth programmes will help organisations adopt a more youth development and youth-centric approach.

So what are these principles?

1. Feelings must be honored: Youth work requires creating a safe space. This is not just about physical space; the space’s ‘sifat’ or atmosphere needs to offer psychological safety. An essential aspect of this is that all feelings must be honoured, and the young person must have the freedom to be. The facilitators and the community in the space must empathise with the young person, acknowledge the feelings and create a non-judgemental space to express themselves through different media.
2. Leading together with adults: Co-creation with young people is essential. As Kareena shared, if we do not understand what young people need and want, and if we make decisions about them without them, we are likely to create a ‘size 10 shoe’ programme. The designs must enable young people and adults to work collaboratively in an inter-generational framework as equal stakeholders, giving each other due respect. Traditional panel discussions and conference formats may not work for the young people, and they may not be able to bring the fullness of their ideas. The designs will therefore need to keep them in mind. Young people are often asked to give inputs but rarely engaged in the running and the evaluation of the intervention. Across my 20+ years of youth work there, in every single youth conference or meeting, I have heard young people across identities and for time and again demand that they would like to be co-leading and co-creating from inception to evaluation.
3. Ownership of self and society: Self-to-society journeys which empower young people to take charge of themselves, as well as that of common spaces and the larger community, are powerful because, as human beings, we live in an interdependent world. These interventions create experiential learning leadership journeys and spaces to enable the young people to connect the larger issues with their own lives and be able to identify and analyze how these impact them and how they in turn can impact these issues. This also creates a space for them to bring up the issues they feel passionate about.
4. Willingness to take risks: Young people do not like to be told. They want to try new things and stretch boundaries. Another critical principle is enabling them to become uncomfortable, take risks, and make mistakes while embracing and learning from them with a safety net. Creating spaces for them to lead action projects in the real world is an example.
5. Inclusion for all: Peer-to-peer learning has time and again been proven to be highly effective for young people. In a diverse setting, the young people learn from one another’s experiences and can let go of stereotypes and singular stories more effectively. It also enables them to learn how to appreciate and leverage diversity and understand how multiple viewing points to any situation must be considered. This is also essential in enabling young people to learn how to build strong relationships across boundaries of ideology, caste, class, religion, gender, sexuality, and region, among others.
6. Now is as important as the future: Even as young people empower themselves for the future, we must realize that the present is as important as the future for the young. They must be able to see the impact in their day-to-day lives in the present and not just be in constant preparation for the future. The indicators of success, therefore, need to be journey markers.
7. Grounded in ‘refl-action’: Acting without reflecting or reflecting without acting both leave the learning cycle incomplete and do not serve us well as leaders in the real world. Hence the need for ‘Refl-action’; a design where there is space for reflection and action in an empowering spiral.

These seven principles are captured in the acronym FLOWING. Together, they help practitioners and organisations create 5th spaces where young people can experience love, freedom, ownership, growth, and social hope while transforming themselves and the world.

In Conclusion: Walking Our Talk

These principles are simple but often challenging to put into motion. We live in an immensely hierarchical and patriarchal society, where young people are not seen as equals and are excluded from any decision-making, be it economically, socially, culturally, or politically. A lot of mindset-shifting and norm-changing work needs to be done. As organisations, youth workers, and facilitators, we must start by walking the talk and leading by example.

We need to invest in capacitating the youth facilitators through transformational experiences to facilitate using the Youth development approach. Youth facilitators often need to experience the 5th space to recognise and co-create it with young people. Organisations must build within themselves the capacities, structures (including leadership teams), and values to create these 5th spaces and embed the youth-centric approach along with and within the issues they focus on. This is true of organisations across sectors and is not limited to CBOs alone. Only then will the Indian youth be able to realise their full potential, and become demographic multipliers to co-create a nation that is upholding our constitutional values and flourishing socially, economically, politically, and culturally.

Notes

1. One of the youngest populations in the world – India’s most valuable asset – IndBiz. ↩︎

2. Decent Work for Youth in India – International Labour Organization. ↩︎

3. Youth can be a clear advantage for India – The Hindu. ↩︎

4. ComMutiny: Incubated by Pravah and SRTT in 2008, with the intent of building vibrant eco systems and empowering spaces to nurture the leadership potential of young people towards transforming self and society. It has over 130 members in 17 states. ↩︎

5. The VartaLeap Coalition is a cross-sectoral grouping of 170 (and growing) youth engaging organisations from the development sector, government, media, educational institutions, and UN agencies who seek to create a movement towards a new norm – Every Youth A Jagrik and Every Space Nurturing Jagriks. ↩︎ ↩︎²

6. Pravah: a non-profit organisation seeded in 1993, with the intent to create safe spaces for adolescents and youth to form their own opinions, worldview, bring about change within themselves and the society around them. ↩︎

7. Patel, Venkateswaran, Prakash and Shekhar (2013). The Ocean in a Drop: Inside-Out Youth Leadership. Sage. ↩︎

8. Education and jobs aren’t enough – India Development Review. ↩︎