2. Empowering Young People

Young people are those between the ages of 15 to 24 years.  Qualitatively, youth is generally defined as a phase when a person moves from a time of dependence (childhood) to independence (adulthood).  This transition involves several common shifts which present unique challenges:

• Moving from school to seeking work and independent sources of income
• Moving from parental home to new living arrangements
• Forming close relationships outside the family, often resulting in marriage and children.

The role of youth policy in this context is to create favourable conditions for success by preparing young people for the roles and responsibilities of adulthood, while recognising that youth is a valuable stage in and of itself with its own unique set of risks and opportunities.  Integrating youth into the design and implementation of youth policy is therefore critical.
The required strategies for working with young people focus on four broad areas which are integrally linked:

• Secondary and Tertiary Education (improved quality and relevance of coursework for job market, adequate school-to-work transitions, safe and healthy schools etc.);
• Informal and non-formal educations (lifelong learning, apprenticeships/internships, youth multipurpose centres, life skills, literacy and innumeracy, vocational skills, ICT, return-to-school programmes, and peer education);
• Healthy Behaviours: Lowering rates of HIV/AIDS, crime, substance abuse, violence and conflict, malfunction, risky sex and early pregnancy, and improving knowledge of reproductive health, parenting skills etc. (provision of relevant and youth-oriented information and services through schools, peer-to-peer programmes, health clinics, mass media);
• Livelihoods and Employment.

Life-Cycle Approach
Children and young people are integrally linked along the life-cycle. If investments are not made in the early years, the costs and consequences become particularly evident in adolescence and early adulthood. And if they are not corrected at this stage, the costs to society can be staggering not just for this generation, but as well for the next as children born to young disadvantaged parents continue the cycle of poverty.   Children represent the highest leverage for investment to build human and social capital; the earlier the investment, the longer the benefits and, usually, the lower the costs.  Investments in youth preserve the benefits of investments in children, counteract lack of earlier investment, and have the added value of immediate intergenerational effects as youth become new parents. 

Evidence is increasingly demonstrating that the costs of NOT investing in youth are staggering both politically and economically.
SERVE is committed to  placing children and youth at the centre of what we do and seeing how we can leverage all our forms of assistance- knowledge, policy advice, lending, grants- to move more rapidly and more effectively towards achieving the results that the international community has agreed to so widely in the Millennium Development Goals.