Partnering With African Youth

This is a 40-page report that provides insights on project implementation challenges, focusing on the technical areas of youth-friendly services and institutional capacity building. The project involved multiple international agencies working with local partners in four countries (Botswana, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda).

Introduction

The African Youth Alliance is similar to the adolescents it represents and strives to empower and assist. Conceived with hope and promise, AYA survived the challenges of its infancy and childhood and entered adolescence with the tasks that all youth face: to forge its own identity, to become strong and competent, and to achieve productivity and success in maturity.
As AYA entered its fourth year, it had matured into a productive project, with notable achievements, even while it still faced challenges commensurate with its lofty goal of assisting youth to prevent HIV and improve their reproductive health. AYA’s parentage and extended family are complex, with numerous structural entities affording guidance and technical assistance. Its activities are numerous and it derives sustenance from global expertise, national policy and programming, and local experience.

This review of Pathfinder/AYA is an effort to capture and document how Pathfinder International, one of AYA’s partners, successfully undertook its responsibilities within this project, implemented the activities of its two component areas, Youth-Friendly Services (YFS) and Institutional Capacity Building (ICB), and worked within the AYA partnership at the country and regional levels.
The review documents the achievements in YFS and ICB through December 2003, including the extent of activities implemented, new materials and tools developed or adapted and other qualitative achievements that have contributed to the overall success of adolescent reproductive health programming in Botswana, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda. It also examines the challenges faced in implementing this project and how they were overcome, and presents lessons learned.

The methodology used for this review included extensive interviews with 18 current and former
Pathfinder/AYA staff members and consultants (see Annex A, List of Persons Interviewed), a review of major existing AYA documents and reports, and gathering data and achievement information from Pathfinder/AYA field staff and technical advisors. The analysis was further informed by the author’s involvement with Pathfinder/AYA as its former director and technical consultant. An earlier version of this review that included recommendations for maximizing effectiveness for the duration of the project was presented to the Pathfinder/AYA staff.
When complicated and ambitious projects direct so much energy into implementation, documentation is often neglected.

This report is an attempt to rectify that omission, and to identify lessons learned so that other similar projects might gain from AYA’s experiences. The listing of materials developed should prove especially useful to those conducting ASRH projects. It can also serve as a touchstone for those participating in the project: to help them appreciate the full extent of their efforts and to clarify the major actions and contributions for those outside the project, often confused by the sheer amount of activity. Finally, it can assist Pathfinder/AYA’s future work by better understanding its past efforts, stumbles as well as strides.