On the COVID-19 pandemic frontlines: Discussion paper with policy recommendations and compendium of resources
Attachments
Download document PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER
The primary audience of this report with the compendium of resources are youth engagement practitioners in the Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies as well as technical experts and policy makers across the humanitarian landscape that thrive for meaningful interventions with and for children, adolescents, and young adults experiencing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Informed by a comprehensive analysis of internal and external environments, this paper aims to contribute to a more holistic and intersectional understanding of the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had and will have on the constituency of children, adolescents, and young adults.
Built around innate and compounded vulnerabilities, this paper challenges the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescents Societies (IFRC) and other practitioners to better explore the nexus between youth engagement and various programmatic areas of humanitarian aid and development, especially the design and delivery of our interventions and programming. Ultimately, by pointing out intersections between meaningful youth engagement and mental health, child protection, education, trust, climate crisis, and others technical fields of humanitarian aid, this paper aspires to catalyse Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) niche and locally driven humanitarian action targeting youth constituency.
More specifically, through setting the broader context, introducing central conceptual theories of human behaviour, and featuring the realities of lives of children, adolescents, and young adults under the COVID-19 from renowned agencies and humanitarian actors (The New York Times, WHO, UNICEF, etc.), this Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) discussion paper offers a unique mapping of the COVID-19 pandemic reality. Through analysis and extrapolation of both the emerging COVID-19 reality and pre-COVID trends in youth development, we propose the Humanitarian excellence 2030: with you and for youth - youth engagement specific policy recommendations for the next decade. Lastly, with the view of bridging the gap between the potential, current practice, and policy recommendations towards 2030, a compendium of resources, a curated list of multilingual and operational tools, has been created.
Through this paper, the IFRC encourages continuous fine-tuning and recalibration of youth engagement strategies and programming, incl. the phasing-out of obsolete ones and the introduction of new ones, to address the humanitarian consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic effectively. Moreover, this paper will help National Societies, regional RCRC Youth Networks, and the IFRC Secretariat to effectively advocate and influence policy and decision-makers to invest in and initiate youth-friendly, youth-driven, and society-owned solutions to improve the lives of children, adolescents, and young adults under the COVID-19 pandemic.
In conclusion, built on the pre-COVID-19 developmental, social, and societal factors influencing positions and well-being of children, adolescents, and young adults and complemented by the COVID-19 impact analysis, this paper extends the developmental trajectory and understanding of meaningful youth engagement within the IFRC and wider humanitarian landscape.
WHAT WILL YOU FIND IN THIS PAPER?
Brevity is the second nature to this paper, as it is built for independent and non-consecutive chapter reading, solely based on the interest of the reader.
The Setting the scene and Dynamics of the pandemics chapters offer a bigger picture content and set the situation of children, adolescents, and young adults living under the COVID-19 pandemic in a wider societal context. These sections will help the reader better discriminate youth-specific vs overall phenomena as well as understand the overarching principles and drivers of human behaviour and decision making in pandemics, as studied by social and developmental psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. In addition, readers are going to understand the key concepts and paradigms helpful in pursuing national-level partnerships for COVID-19 youth-led and society-owned programming. Lastly, the sample of global data shall guide National Societies in their search of locally relevant evidence.
The Living as COVID-19 affected youth through to the Empowered, enabled, and protected chapters explore the realities of youth under the COVD-19 pandemic across several themes such as mental health, climate crisis, vaccination, trust, child labour, education, health, or poverty and race. The primary purpose of these chapters is to document and point out multifaceted impact of the COVID-19 on youth and help the practitioners better understand the complexity of the situations that youth living under COVID-19 find themselves in. In these chapters, we bring curated content reported by renowned news agencies such as The New York Times, Dear Spiegel, The Guardia, or The Telegraph as well as findings of the most recently published research studies (World Economic Forum, IFRC, Human Rights Watch, UNICEF, Save the Children, WHO, and others) that capture the voice of children, adolescents, and young adults during the pandemic. Evidence-based substance from external sources in these chapters is enriched by analytical content that points out lessons learnt form the past and their pertinency to today’s situation in the domain of youth programming and youth development. Furthermore, findings and positions referred in external sources are analysed against the key IFRC principles of meaningful youth engagement, so that areas of possible synergies with potential partners are highlighted.
To ensure and safeguard value-add and unique content, these cut-off criteria were applied when selecting resources featured in this paper:
Demonstrated thought leadership exploring interconnections between traditionally isolated and soloed topics that are pertinent to creating a better world with and for children, adolescents, and young adults.
Intersectional and holistic take-on the role of youth and solutions tailored for the youth constituency,
Novelty in understanding implications for humanitarian actors vis-à-vis children, adolescents, and young adults as stakeholders in crisis management,
Unorthodox perspectives featuring the needs, rights, and potential of children, adolescents, and young adults during and post-pandemic,
Recognition of multi-layered identities of individuals and heterogeneity of the constituency of children, adolescents, and young adults.
The impression of content repetitiveness in some parts is precisely a reflection of the “repetitive” but not same impact coming at youth and children from several domains of life such as education, protection, climate crisis, health, loss of jobs of primary care givers, etc. This differently sourced or originated impacts exists due to a number of youth-specific and overlapping vulnerabilities that are not, have not been, and will not be unique during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Humanitarian excellence 2030: with and for youth is a chapter in which we come to a full circle with bringing in the RCRC work, ambitions, and collective aspirations, and commitments. In this chapter, we present transformative policy recommendations and call on ourselves, our partners, and decision and policy makers for tangible action to:
Address developmental roadblocks hindering well-being of youth and meaningful youth engagement under the COVID-19,
Accelerate localisation and wide ownership of solutions tailored for youth constituency,
Elevate well-being and protection as key pillars of youth engagement,
Nurture youth-led influence and impact.
The Compendium of resources is a final substantive chapter. It is rich in multilingual resources to support National Societies when they decide to enrich their activities with and for young people living under COVID-19. Resources featured in this section are organised in subcategories: Young people as frontliners, Youth-friendly mental health and psychosocial support resources, Domestic and gender-based violence, Child safeguarding and protection, Education, Flighting misinformation. The compendium is completed with a list of principal RCRC and our major partner e-hubs for humanitarian operations and programming in the COVID-19 pandemic.