Enabling Environment
Positive youth development enhances youth assets and competencies; strengthen supports available to youth in their homes, schools, and communities; and provide opportunities for them to meaningfully engage on their communities. To be successful, youth should be surrounded by a community that maximizes their assets, agency, and access to services and opportunities, while providing a safe and supportive space for expression and growth. An enabling environment encourages and recognizes youth, while promoting their social and emotional competence to thrive. PYD programs target environmental influences, with the most attention given to schools and families. Reviews of PYD programs indicate that interventions attempt some type of microsystemic or mesosystemic change involving schools, families, or community-based organizations in an attempt to foster developmental competencies in children and adolescents. Systemic changes are most commonly exemplified by programs seeking to improve aspects of a school’s psychosocial climate, to enhance the family environment or modify parenting practices, to connect young people to prosocial adult models through mentoring relationships and after-school programming, and to forge connections between families, schools, and community-based organizations. Strengthening the capacity of community members and community‐based organizations, including churches and faith‐based groups to directly support children and youth enables community members to value and further engage youth.
A safe and supportive enabling environment is also essential to facilitate youth access to health services. Adolescents have special sexual and reproductive health needs that remain unmet, mainly due to lack of knowledge, social stigma, laws and policies preventing provision of contraception and abortion to unmarried (or any) adolescents, and judgmental attitudes among service providers. To maintain sexual and reproductive health, adolescents need access to accurate information and to the safe, effective, affordable, and acceptable contraception method of their choice. They also must be informed and empowered to protect themselves from STIs. Combining youth development approaches with the provision of accurate, age-appropriate, and evidence-based reproductive health education, as well as access to clinical reproductive health and HIV services and targeting social norms is essential in improving youth health outcomes. Pivotal to fostering an enabling environment is the need to engage governments, communities, and other members of civil society to move discourse about family planning, reproductive health and HIV.
Achieving the benefits of investment in young people also depends on a secure environment and a belief by youth that they have a stake in governance, peace, and democracy. It is critical to apply a youth lens in programming within humanitarian contexts in order to understand from their perspective the role that local governance, institutions, and other actors play in shaping the drivers of violence extremism, community violence, and conflict.
This section is divided into the following subsections: