Executive Summary

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As the global agency for youth-led development, Restless Development strives to improve the understanding and approaches taken to youth

engagement across the development sector and beyond. Currently, development practitioners tend to view young people as beneficiaries and

targets: a problem to be solved. However, with 50% of the world’s population under 30, we should be engaging young people as partners and

agents of change. The ability to effectively engage the Peak Youth generation - the largest ever global youth population - and allow them the space

and opportunities to lead collaboratively in development, represents a historic opportunity to bring about transformative change on a global scale.

A failure to support, engage and work alongside this generation of young people who are ready to do things differently would mean that this

opportunity is missed. In order to ensure that this does not happen and in collaboration with a range of local and national partners,

Restless Development has developed and pioneered our Meaningful Youth Engagement approach which has already been delivered and

tailored for leading development agencies such as DfID, USAID and DANIDA.

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Our Approach

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Restless Development promotes programmes that engage young people as partners and leaders, in which young people are empowered, while

at the same time able to access and learn from the life experience and expertise of adults. Whilst recognising that youth can be both beneficiaries

and partners in development action, this approach moves a step beyond by involving and supporting youth as leaders to engage, listen to and

collaborate with; in achieving effective development outcomes. Achieving meaningful youth engagement in development can therefore be

recognised as an incremental process, in which individual projects and programmes can engage youth on one of a range of different levels.

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As an agency committed to being ‘bigger than the sum of our parts in promoting and facilitating transformative change, Restless Development is

going beyond simply adopting the above approach in its own programming - we are collaborating with institutions, governments and

practitioners across the development sector to meaningfully engage young people in their programmes as a tool to increase their programmatic

impact. In order to convey this across the sector, Restless Development has developed a Meaningful Youth Engagement approach that codifies how

we, as the experts in youth-led transformative change, want to work with and support the development sector to engage youth in a meaningful way.

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Restless Development works with partners to utilise our experience of Meaningful Youth Engagement to develop tailored training and capacity

building programmes to meet the specific needs of organisations, governments and NGOs. From our youth-led accountability programmes, to our

communications and media presence, we ensure that decision-makers and practitioners are responsive to youth voices, ideas and actions.

Our approach focuses on changing the development narrative and practice from one in which children and youth are viewed as beneficiaries or

recipients of aid by governments, aid agencies and civil society actors, to one in which they can truly take up the mantle and lead sustainable

development.