Participatory youth-led community development: A child-centered visual SWOT analysis in India

Abstract

In India, 27.5% of the population is youth in the age group of 15–29 years and 67.5% of the Indian population lives in rural and semi-urban areas. Youth civic engagements and youth-led initiatives are crucial for community development. The purpose of this paper is to examine how well youth-led initiatives are creating a positive impact in the community, as well as how these initiatives are recognized by their own community members and key stakeholders. This paper describes how youth-led visual technology and media-based community development processes transformed a nomadic tribal community in India with a focus on promoting child rights. The project “INaGi: A Child-Centered Visual SWOT” (Ilaingargaludan Nagaramum Giramamum, Tamil for “Youth with Urban and Rural Areas”) was executed by Trust for Youth and Child Leadership (TYCL), a youth-led organization based in Pondicherry, India. The project offered visual technology and media tools to local youth to capture the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the tribal community and provided space for them to reflect, connect, and act for mutual social transformation. This process recognizes indigenous knowledge, co-creation, and the power of young people and new age technology, and it enables local people to innovate local solutions for local problems. Furthermore, this paper discusses a youth-led bottom-up approach for the planning and execution of child-centered community development, as particularly distinct from a donor-driven project approach. Visual-based participatory action research methods were adopted to engage youth, community members, and other key stakeholders of the project. This paper captures the participatory youth-led community development process, its positive outcomes, and lessons learned from the process and put forth recommendations for key stakeholders.