Youth Leadership

Youth Leadership

OUR GOAL

With our work on Youth Leadership, we support youth-led organizations and youth-leaders worldwide to become sustainable youth-led organizations. We provide our partners with:

  • capacity building and technical assistance on both an organizational and individual level;
  • tools on meaningful youth participation and  sexual and reproductive health and rights;
  • organizational and financial management support;
  • support on fundraising opportunities;
  • acces to our network and connections to a wider youth movement.
  • We also provide our partners with opportunities to advocate at the international level via CHOICE’s work on youth-led advocacy. This way the local and national experiences of our partners is amplified at national, international and regional advocacy processes and are our partners able to hold their national governments accountable for international agreements they made.

Our work on Youth Leadership does not have a one-size-fits-all approach. Every partner has different strengths and weaknesses. We assess the needs of each partner in order to jointly develop a capacity building plan most suited to them.  We aim to partner with youth-led organizations with diverse levels of capacity – ranging from starting grassroots youth groups with a lot of learning potential to be capacitated, but also established youth-led organizations that we can support in amplifying their work even more.


To ensure that young people can participate in decision-making processes, CHOICE also builds the capacities of adult-led organizations to work with young people in a meaningful way.

YOU(TH) DO IT!

YOU(TH) Do IT! is CHOICE's resource hub: on it you can find all our resources and training materials on meaningful youth participation, youth-led advocacy and sexual reproductive health and rights. Furthermore, it has information on youth friendly services, awareness raising and leadership. YOU(TH) Do IT! aims to offer all the tools, skills and resources needed by youth advocate trying to make an impact on the world!

Technical partnerships

CHOICE currently works within technical partnerships where we work on capacity strengthening around sexual and reproductive health and rights

OUR PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Our work on Youth Leadership is currently implemented through four different programs: Get Up Speak Out, Yes I Do, Right Here Right Now and Rights, Evidence, Action. The latter two programs are also part of our work on Youth-Led Advocacy.

GET UP SPEAK OUT (FOR YOUTH RIGHTS)

The Get Up Speak Out program (GUSO) is developed by young people for young people and came into being as a collaboration between 6 Dutch/UK organizations; Rutgers (lead organization), CHOICE for Youth and Sexuality, dance4life, Simavi, Stop Aids Now! and IPPF and is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With GUSO we work towards a society where all young people, especially girls and young women, are empowered to realize their SRHR in societies that are positive towards young people’s sexuality.  The program is implemented in two Asian countries (Indonesia and Pakistan) and in five African countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda), by in-country alliances.

YES I DO

Yes I Do is an alliance consisting out of Plan Netherlands (lead organization), CHOICE for Youth and Sexuality, AMREF Netherlands, Rutgers and the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), together with our partner organizations in Africa and Asia. The program focusses on the prevention of child marriages, teenage pregnancies and female genital mutilation/cutting. It aims to create a future in which adolescent girls can decide if, when and whom to marry, if, when and with whom to have children and are protected from female genital mutilation/cutting. CHOICE implements this program in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Indonesia and Pakistan.

All young people worldwide should be able to explore, experience and express their sexualities in healthy, pleasurable and safe ways.