How is youth empowerment defined?
Youth empowerment is the process through which adolescents and young adults build the skills, confidence and support they need to make informed decisions about their education, work and relationships. In practice, it depends on skills a young person can use, such as decision-making and resilience, and on families and schools that make room for those decisions. Room to Read is a nonprofit organization that has supported foundational learning skills, including literacy in the early grades and life skills in secondary school, since 2000, and our gender equality programming has benefited more than 4.5 million adolescents across 14 geographies. This article explains why youth empowerment matters during adolescence, what makes a youth empowerment program work and how to measure the results, drawing on our Life Skills for Equality Project in Cambodia. The decisions that define youth empowerment cluster in adolescence, when young people choose whether to continue school, which work to pursue and when to marry. According to UNESCO, approximately 251 million children and youth are out of school, which means many of those decisions are made without the support and skills that secondary school can provide. The same pressures show up in the transition from school to work. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), in its Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024, 20.4 percent of young people worldwide were not in employment, education or training in 2023, and two in three of them were young women. Gender norms help explain why young women are overrepresented in that figure, and they also place rigid expectations on boys. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 2023 Gender Social Norms Index found that almost nine out of 10 men and women hold biases against women, based on data from 80 countries and territories covering 85 percent of the world’s population. When adolescents leave school without strong literacy and life skills, the loss compounds over a working lifetime and across a national economy. According to the World Bank, today’s students risk losing US$21 trillion in lifetime earnings, nearly one-fifth of today’s global GDP, if learning poverty goes unaddressed. Because the pressures on young people gather in adolescence, while skills and attitudes about gender are still forming, the programs with the strongest evidence teach specific skills during those years and involve the adults around each young person. Four design features recur in the evidence from our own programs: a structured curriculum taught over several years, sessions that include adolescents of all genders, space for some topics to be discussed in single-gender groups and the involvement of families and teachers. The same four features are a practical checklist for anyone comparing organizations that offer youth empowerment programs. Life skills are the abilities that let a young person manage day-to-day challenges and make informed decisions, and they develop through repeated practice across the adolescent years. Our life skills curriculum builds five domains in a set order: collaboration, resilience, leadership, decision-making and critical thinking. Each domain is taught through sessions in which adolescents practice the skill on situations drawn from their own lives, such as negotiating a disagreement with a classmate or planning the next step after secondary school. Gender norms restrict girls, and they also place harmful expectations on boys about masculinity and household roles. Our Life Skills for Equality Project, a two-year project in Cambodia, brought boys into gender-focused sessions so that participants of all genders could examine the norms that shape their choices together. The project’s endline evaluation found that co-educational sessions gave boys and girls the chance to learn from one another, while participants said that topics such as menstruation and emotional vulnerability were easier to discuss in single-gender groups. Sessions on masculinity, offered only to boys, drew strong engagement, and girls described the sessions on emotional regulation and leadership as the most useful. Changes in a young person’s choices last longer when the adults around them understand the program. In the Life Skills for Equality Project, parents reported that their sons had become more responsible and more willing to share household work, and some said their own views about gender roles had begun to change. Because a youth empowerment program aims to change both skills and choices, measuring it requires evidence at three levels, from the skills themselves to the decisions young people make years later. The table below sets out each level and how we measure it in our programs. Level What is measured How we measure it Skills Collaboration, resilience, leadership, decision-making and critical thinking Aspirations and attitudes Plans for education and work, ideal age of marriage, views on gender roles Baseline and endline surveys, as in the Life Skills for Equality Project Outcomes Grade advancement, completion, work or tertiary education after graduation Program records and alumnae tracking. In recent years, over 99 percent of girls enrolled in our Girls’ Education Program have advanced to the next grade, and more than 80 percent of graduates secure work or enroll in tertiary education within five years of graduation Outcome measures carry the most weight, because they record what young people do, and Room to Read tracks them for girls in our Girls’ Education Program. Aspirations and attitudes are self-reported and can change quickly, so they are best read as early signals that a program is shifting the way participants think about their futures. The endline evaluations of the Life Skills for Equality Project, which combined quantitative surveys with qualitative interviews, found shifts in how participants of all genders see their futures. The table compares the baseline and endline surveys. Measure Baseline Endline Ideal age of marriage reported by girls 24.6 25.57 Ideal age of marriage reported by boys 24.7 26.05 Share aspiring to attend university 73.78 percent of girls, 61.01 percent of boys In interviews, boys described using communication and negotiation in place of aggression to resolve conflicts, while girls reported more confidence in speaking up in class and leading peer discussions. These findings are self-reported and come from a single project, so they show the direction of change in aspirations and attitudes. The outcome measures in the first table, drawn from our Girls’ Education Program, show what our life skills approach produces over a longer period. The programs described above are part of a larger organization. Since 2000, our work has been guided by the belief that World Change Starts with Educated Children®. We have benefited more than 60 million children across 29 geographies, through programs that begin with literacy in the early grades and continue with life skills in secondary school. Charity Navigator has awarded us 20 four-star ratings. We have more than 1,200 staff across 19 countries, and nearly 90 percent of our team is based in the countries where we work. Local leaders guide our community-based operations from program design to implementation, which keeps sessions grounded in the norms and choices that adolescents in each community face. The design features and measures described earlier shape how we support adolescents. Our approach follows a sequence, with literacy in the early grades building a foundation for all later learning and life skills in secondary school equipping adolescents to make informed choices about their own futures. Our Girls’ Education Program pairs life skills sessions with mentoring and engagement with families. The results of that combination appear in the outcome measures above. The Life Skills for Equality Project extended our life skills curriculum to adolescents of all genders, and the same curriculum now reaches students at national scale. In Cambodia, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport adopted our life skills curriculum for Grades 7–9 nationwide, as a co-educational curriculum for all students. Support for Room to Read funds more than individual sessions. It invests in the systems, partnerships and infrastructure that let a proven life skills curriculum reach adolescents across entire education systems. We publish new results from our life skills programming, including evaluations like the Life Skills for Equality Project, as each study is completed. Signing up is the most direct way to follow what adolescents in our programs achieve over time. Sign up below to receive Room to Read program results and new research on life skills as they are published.Why is youth empowerment important?
Where young people lose ground
What is at stake for economies
What makes a youth empowerment program work?
A structured curriculum taught over several years
Sessions that include adolescents of all genders
Families and teachers as part of the program
How do you measure youth empowerment?
Results from our project in Cambodia
About Room to Read
Our scale and reach
A locally led organization
How Room to Read addresses youth empowerment
Life skills sessions in the Girls’ Education Program
Working with governments to reach adolescents at scale
How to stay informed