Monitoring youth empowerment and employability in Indonesia with Oxfam

The Empower Youth for Work programme, initiated by Oxfam, aims to reduce poverty in rural coastal areas by empowering youth, especially young women, to seek and obtain decent work. The programme works with young people, the government, and the private sector to support youth in gaining better employment opportunities.

Employing a holistic approach, the programme works with a wide range of sectors to address gender-based discrimination, sexual health, and quality education. All of these factors affect young people in seeking opportunities and making choices about their employment. Akvo provides the tools and services to monitor the results of this programme, documenting valuable insights which inform decision making.

Above: An Empower Youth for Work workshop on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, April 2017.

This programme focuses on two islands – Sulawesi and Java – both of which have high poverty rates and are prone to the impacts of climate change. Young women in particular face difficulties in participating in the economy, due to a wide range of socio-economic factors, from sexual health to education.

According to Oxfam, West Java has the highest unemployment rate, despite being located near the capital city of Jakarta. Young people are therefore migrating to larger cities to work as labourers, often leaving young women behind without the resources to be self reliant. In Sulawesi, women are largely responsible for producing food for their families, and extreme weather conditions are resulting in fisherman having less fish to sell. As a result, women are forced into precarious working conditions. To ensure lasting success, the Empower Youth for Work programme needed a robust data collection tool and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) solution to capture high quality data, track progress and share results.

Akvo provides the tools to capture high quality data in the field and to share that data for decision making and learning. Akvo Flow is used to collect baseline data on the young people in Sulawesi and Java so that the programme can be implemented in the most effective way. By providing training to young people and setting up computers in youth centres, the programme equips young people with the resources and skills to regularly share their stories and activities using powerful mobile storytelling tools.

The activities include helping youth to develop the right behaviours for work, claim their rights to better working conditions, and enjoy social environments that support their growth and potential. The programme also works with private companies to generate new economic opportunities and with parents and community members to enable healthy environments for youth to become self reliant. Government and companies are also engaged and made accountable for increased gender-sensitive and youth-friendly policies, and knowledge regarding climate change resilience and sexual health is actively shared. Akvo’s tools and expertise are used to monitor the effects of these activities and to encourage knowledge sharing.

70%

of young people targeted are women

2000

young people interviewed

60

Stories published from the field

The qualitative and quantitative data collected by the young people and youth reporters is being used to reliably measure the success of the programme. So far, more than 2,000 young people have been interviewed using surveys in Akvo Flow, and more than 60 stories have been published from the field. The websites for the programme have been launched in Indonesian and English as a platform to share information. Social media platforms are also being actively used. Over the next few months, the baseline data will be published publicly, so that future data collection efforts can be compared and the progress of the programme can be shared and learned from.