Bringing Project CREATE to Rwanda: Co-Creating Change with Young People
Project Principal Investigator Professor Paul Cooke discusses a recent trip to Rwanda in Africa where he put some of the findings from Project CREATE into practice in another of his projects.
As part of our work under the auspices of UKRI’s Adolescence, Mental Health and the Developing Mind programme, and through both Project CREATE and ATTUNE, one central message has emerged from young people’s engagement with arts-based practices: the importance of being heard and truly listened to.
This means more than simply involving young people in co-production activities. It means ceding authority to them. And it means that projects must ultimately be as accountable to the young people as they are to other stakeholders, especially those we are traditionally more aware of the need to listen to, not least our funders.
5.4 million children live in institutions worldwide - 80% of them have at least one parent (photo: Hope and Homes for Children).
From listening to systemic change
Hearing young people and ceding authority to them is crucial in developing meaningful mental health support programmes. But this is not the only context where hearing young people is central to our work.
Alongside our work with UKRI, members of the team have also been involved in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the UK-based NGO Hope and Homes for Children. This organisation works to deinstitutionalise childcare systems, shifting them towards family-based settings, which the literature overwhelmingly shows are much better for children’s wellbeing.
Silent voices in childcare systems
If society were truly accountable to children, we would not deprive them of their liberty by confining them in institutions. Today, around 5.4 million children are housed in institutions worldwide, generically termed ‘orphanages’. 80% of them are not orphans.
A lack of accountability to children and young people prevents their voices from being heard. They are largely excluded from decisions about their own care, especially children with disabilities. Meanwhile, tokenistic practices claiming to include children and young people’s participation often fail to listen to and action their ideas and concerns, which stifles youth voices and creates an unjust childcare system.
There needs to be greater investment in accountability to children and young people
Power imbalance between donors and aid programme participants
There needs to be greater investment in accountability to children and young people. Yet, the current way aid is administered often works against their meaningful participation and strengthening of accountability to them. This is largely due to the power imbalance in favour of those who determine how aid is allocated, who benefits and how.
Accountability in the aid sector is biased upward to donors rather than downward to affected communities. As a result, participants in aid programmes often have little power to hold charities accountable, even though they are the reason for charities’ existence and legitimacy.
Insights from Project CREATE help inform youth participation across borders.
Building a toolkit for youth-led change in the aid sector
In this Knowledge Transfer Partnership, the University of Leeds in partnership with Hope and Homes for Children, is seeking to address this issue by drawing on insights from Project CREATE and ATTUNE about how arts-based practices can support this work.
Starting from the complex and often contradictory nature of 'accountability' within the aid sector, the project aims to co-develop, with children and young people, a definition and practical toolkit for the implementation of child-focused accountability across Hope and Homes for Children (initially).
This toolkit will encourage organisations to see children and young people as equal partners in the development and delivery of the services designed to support them.
"From fear to no fear" - images amplifying youth voices in Kigali (photo: Hope and Homes for Children).
From creative expression to policy impact: youth voices in action
Most recently, in our project, this has involved working with young people in Sofia (the capital city of Bulgaria) and Kigali (the capital city of Rwanda) to develop manifestos for action, setting out in very concrete terms how participants feel their society needs to change to become more accountable to them.
In Kigali, this involved groups of young people creating animations about the changes they believe are needed.
These animations were then presented to high-level policy makers who engaged with the young people as true experts in their own experience – voices that must be listened to if change is going to happen.
Professor Paul Cooke’s week in Rwanda revealed the power of creative youth-led engagement with policy-makers.
Real listening, real impact: the journey has just begun
For everyone present, it was a remarkable encounter and really showed the potential of genuinely listening to young people and making decisions that takes their experiences into account.
And it has been wonderful to see how this meeting has already provoked further discussions with those present. It is clear the meeting really resonated with those present.
But this is just the first step. There is a great deal more to come in this project, and it will clearly benefit from the lessons learned in Project CREATE and ATTUNE.