| New resource for engaging youth in conflict and crisis-affected settings The Adolescent Kit for Expression and Innovation is a package of guidance, tools and supplies to support country programmes to reach and engage adolescents ages 10-18 affected by conflict and other crises through education, child protection, youth development and/or peacebuilding initiatives. For full details and additional downloads, visit: http://adolescentkit.org/ The purpose of the adolescent kit for expression and innovation is to promote positive outcomes for adolescents' psychosocial wellbeing, learning life skills, and positive active engagement in their communities through cross-sectoral adaptable, developmentally appropriate approaches. The kit especially support activities using arts, innovation and adolescent-led projects as methods to achieve those outcomes. The kit is flexible and adaptable to different types of programming contexts, including recent-onset emergencies and protracted crises, as well as other low resource environments. It is also designed to be adapted to the developmental capacities, interests and priorities of the adolescents with whom it is used. It can be used to support new programmes or introduced into ongoing initiatives. The entire kit was developed as a resource that can be used in peacebuilding initiatives, and the guidance is aligned to the Peacebuilding Competency Framework that the Adolescent Development and Participation programme (ADAP) developed and disseminated in late 2014. Prototypes were tested in 2015 with UNICEF country offices and their partners in South Sudan, Indonesia, State of Palestine, Bhutan and Myanmar. Analysis of experiences, along with user feedback, suggestions and ideas were then incorporated into the finalized design of the kit to be made available in UNICEF's supply catalogue. Kits will be made available globally to UNICEF country offices both online and through UNICEF's supply catalogue in Spring of 2016. Using Innovative Approaches in Designing the Kit The Adolescent Kit is the first UNICEF kit to use 'design thinking' and 'human centered design' (HCD) methods in its creation. Extensive efforts have been made to discover and understand the needs, desires and behaviours of adolescents and facilitators in low-resource and humanitarian-action environments. These learnings - combined with research into materials and design innovations - guided the generation of a number of concepts around the kit's functionality, look and user-experience. Concepts were developed into prototypes and evaluated in the field for characteristics such as portability, durability and multi-functionality. Results from the field were incorporated in the final design. |
|
AuthorIn July 2017 I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge, exploring issues of peacebuilding through education in the wake of violent intergroup conflict. This is a space I use to share thoughts and discoveries related to my research. Archives
October 2022
Categories |