National adolescent consultation

Raised Rs.0

Goal Rs.0

DELHI

National level adolescent consultation was held at vishva yuva kendra( the youth resource center) New delhi. The regional winners from each state participated in the national consultation. The consultation was held from 3/ 10/16 -6/10/16. In this national consultation programme students from different states like, Assam, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and Telangana, followed by 1 national level event in Delhi.

1.2 Objectives

UNICEF wants to play a role in further unlocking the power of adolescents as development actors, delivering on the frontline and driving changes in harmful social norms. The idea is to involve and consult with adolescents in a meaningful way, in the preparatory phase of upcoming UNICEF Country Program 2018-2022. In this context, UNICEF invited Pravah and ComMutiny Youth Collective (CYC) to partner with them in order to implement the project. Pravah was the lead partner along with CYC and five other regional partners, who implemented the project in five regions and in Delhi. The regional partners were, People for Change (Jharkhand), Rubaroo (Telangana), Pravah Jaipur Initiative (Rajasthan), We Are Young Foundation (Assam), and Audacious Dreams (Tamil Nadu).

This project aimed at conducting a series of 5 participatory regional level consultations with adolescents throughout the country. The consultations were held in Assam, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and Telangana, followed by 1 national level event in Delhi.

The intention behind holding such consultations was to ensure that voices of adolescents are included in the UNICEF strategy for the coming years. The outcome would help specifically in setting the agenda for adolescent programming in a manner that engages them more directly.

The exercise will also further pave the roadmap for youth centric organizations at regional and national level to come together and further refine their strategy for youth and adolescent participation and engagement. These consultations built capacity of a cadre of youth and adolescent facilitators across the regions and engaged directly with 150 participants and their communities across India.

Broad objectives of the whole exercise are:

To provide a platform for active and meaningful engagement and participation of adolescents to highlight their needs and priorities

To enable adolescents to make recommendations on the issues to be addressed by stakeholders and decision makers to feed into the UNICEF 2018-22 country program

The 3-day consultation aimed at:

Creating an empowering and safe space for adolescents where they can express and freely share their feelings and thoughts with each other

Enabling the participants to identify and articulate the needs of adolescents for their overall development and well being with a focus on UNICEF priority issues

Enabling the participants to articulate the issues and challenges in fulfilling their needs for their overall development with a focus on UNICEF priority issues

Enabling the participants to articulate and enlist their recommendations on the issues they feel

would help in their overall development important with special focus on UNICEF priority issues

day wise highlights of the events

day 1:

day 1 comprised of the participants from Delhi. The day started with the small introduction on UNICEF to the participants. Then the students were made to sit in the large groups and they were asked to make a paper plan and asked to write about themselves in that plan and then they were made to fly those planes. And all the participants were asked to randomly pick the planes and made them to introduce their friends to all.

A screenerager film was projected to the students which portrait the problems of prison like schools. And after this screenager participants dicussed their views on the film and also they sugesseted few ways for how the schools should be. Then small debriefing was done on the movie played stating the improper education system. Later wish tree was made and the students were asked to write down their wishes in the colourful leaves provided to them . and successfully pasted those leaves on the trees.after pasting their wishes on the tree. Everyone together participated in framing their own rules for the upcoming session of the consultation.

The next session of the consultation brought out the listening capacity of the participants . in order to bring so a small game called Chinese whisper. Then dicussed why the whispers did not workout .many interesting answers came like low voice, lack of understanding etc.. Came up..Later small papers with 31 needs were provided to each participant and they were asked to select the top three needs which they preferred to be the most important one. And the people with the same needs were asked to form a single group and asked to prioritize the needs that they have marked. Later facilitator dictated a story called the dream of the carpet and asked the participants to make their own dream carpet out of the things that they provided all students engaged themselves very merrily in making their dream carpet and displayed the carpet on the board and presented their wishes for future days in that carpet. By this the session came to an end .

Day 2:

Day two started with the small recap of the previous day. Each participant picks one card from a deck and depending on the suit (Heart – feeling, Spade – suggestion, Diamond – Learning Club – Any of the three) shares his/her reflection of the previous day. Feelings like Happy to be heard, happy to make so many friends, enthusiastic, excitement, Learnings like language is not a barrier to communicate, move over failures, improving communication skills, being confident, not to shy away from trying and Suggestions like more time for cultural programmes, everyone should speak up emerged. Charts were provided to all of the participants and were asked to draw the dream river in the chart and displayed their life journey towards their goal that they wish to achieve in their life. participants were made to sit in groups and were asked to dicucess the problem of the adolocent and pendowen that in the chart.and were also asked to bring doen the solutions to all those problems at three levels such as self, community, UNICEF/government.with this the session concluded.

Day 3:

The final day of the consultation started with the recap of the previous day and contunied with the policy framing of the precious day left outs. Many representatives of UNICEF from france,Russia,Egypt, srilanka, Africa, Chennai,delhi, etc.. Came to final consultation and evaluated the polices of the participants . on the day all the policies were combined into groups based the similarities of the problem and finally the top ten policies were derived and solutions to it was also consised by this the national level consultation