Young people using insights to drive change
Through our youth-led research approach, we partner with young people to capture key insights on the issues that matter most to them. We strive to make research accessible to diverse young people and actionable for decision-makers.
For us, youth-led research is not just about ensuring meaningful youth engagement in everything we do. It is not just about ensuring youth insights are captured by those best positioned to do so – their peers. It is also fundamentally about shifting power, posing: Who is an ‘expert’? Who owns knowledge? Who gets to generate knowledge?
We listen to young people
Through our growing investment in research, we value listening to lived experience and needs of the young people we support. Through our youth-led research approach, we listen to the expertise and insight of their peers, whom we engage as partner researchers. Our approach seeks to maximise their leadership at every stage of the research process.
Supporting young people to conduct research is about more than just the leadership journey it affords them. Meaningfully engaging young people in research enhances the relevance and accuracy of the insights we generate. We believe that youth leadership in research means we:
Ask better questions.
Because we ensure that we ask the right questions – those that are relevant to young people’s priorities.
Capture better data.
Because young researchers can develop a deeper rapport with their peers, gaining richer access to their lived experience.
Generate better insights.
Because young people can identify findings where we have ‘blind spots’ and miss nuance in our data.
Living in the Climate Crisis
Climate change is affecting young people in Uganda. How are they addressing the crises? Read our latest report.
Read the reportMeet the researchers
We work with hundreds of young researchers on a variety of projects across Africa and Asia. Here is what some of them have to say about their experiences in research, and why it is important that youth research be led by young people.
Investigating my generation’s issues as a young researcher has enabled me to become a leader, inspiring others
Ziyad, 25, Iraq
No one else knows more about youth issues and how to solve them than young people ourselves. We are the experts.
Mialy, 24, Madagascar
Youth-led research has a special value because we’re interacting with our fellow young people – we know how to interact
Emmanuel, 23, Uganda
Participating in research on young people’s employment has given me the confidence to see myself as a contributor to job creation, not just as a job-seeker
Dzidzor, 23, Ghana
Leading research has fueled an interest in me to broaden policy-maker’s lenses, to build thriving youthful communities
Isaac, 22, Kenya
By involving young people in research, we can bring out different perspectives on the issues that matter to us
Grace, 24, Zambia
These are the countries where we have long-term investments, working with multiple researchers. However, we also have current researchers and alumni in over 10 additional countries.
What are they working on?
We don’t conduct just any research. We are guided by the priorities of young people and by the unanswered questions that arise from the previous work we’ve done. In doing so, we are curating a growing evidence base, constantly driven by digging deeper into the issues we are investigating and generating more detailed insights.
With a rich portfolio, we can’t capture all of our insights here. However, these are the questions that our researchers are asking now:
Education and Livelihoods
Young people should have a say in the education and job opportunities that shape their lives.
How can young people lead the conversation to ensure they can access education and livelihood opportunities that are appropriate for the world we live in?
Strengthening Youth Civil Society:
What support do youth-led civil society organisations need to achieve their strategic ambitions?
What is the long-term impact of the crisis on youth civil society’s resilience?
Capturing the Local Impact of Climate Change:
How is climate change affecting young people, their health and livelihoods, and how are they responding?
What aspects of their experience are missing from the global conversation?
Supporting Young People’s Resilience to COVID-19:
How are diverse groups of young people being uniquely affected by COVID-19 and its ongoing, realtime impacts?
How are individual young people, and youth civil society coping, adapting, and responding to these impacts?
Watch this space and see what they learn!
Through our youth-led research, we are establishing a generation of thought leaders
At Restless Development, we do not conduct research for intellectual curiosity. We judge the success of our research on how well our findings are used. We use the evidence we generate in 3 ways: to inform the programmes we design; to influence development policy and practice; and to broaden perspectives on the role young people can play in local, national, regional, and international decision-making spaces.
“Our research on young people’s adoption of agricultural technology identified those in rural communities lack information on available technologies because it is shared on the wrong channels. We are working with an agribusiness incubator in Uganda on a plan to change that.” Winnie 24, Uganda
We support our young researchers to use the transferable skills they learn through research through their careers. We use their findings to influence our programmes and others work. We convene our network of alumni researchers to share news and opportunities.
Our research projects & reports
These are just some of the projects our young researchers are working on around the world.
Let’s talk
Want to find out more? Interested to know how you can work with talented young researchers? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us at research@restlessdevelopment.org
