A growing body of literature documents the impact of armed-conflict on the health of adolescents and young people. However, funding levels for youth programming do not meet the needs of this population and strategies for implementing sustainable youth programs have hardly been explored. As a result, interventions focused on youth are implemented on an ad hoc basis and good practices for achieving long-term sustainability have been poorly documented. In Kosovo, International Medical Corps in collaboration with a local NGO, Kosovo Action Together, developed a program model for implementing a community-based response to the psychosocial needs of young people exposed to a decade of discrimination, persecution, and ethnic-conflict. This presentation will discuss the findings of a sustainability assessment conducted throughout youth centers in Kosovo, and will highlight an ongoing pilot-study utilizing the Community Youth Partnership Model (CYPM) in the peri-urban town of Podujevo in northeastern Kosovo. The CYPM utilizes community participation, public and private sector contribution, cost-recovery schemes, and youth leadership/management groups as methods by which to achieve independence from traditional funding structures and sustain youth development activities. Challenges to implementing the CYPM in other resource poor and post conflict settings as well as implications for funding and government policy toward building a sustainable infrastructure for youth activities will be discussed.
Learning Objectives: At the end of this session, participants will be able to: 1. Discuss how existing youth centers throughout Kosovo implement psychosocial interventions to mitigate the impact of armed-conflict on youth. 2. Describe the pros and cons of youth center sustainability strategies in Kosovo and their application to the global arena. 3. Suggest recommendations for devising new approaches to funding global youth health interventions.
Keywords: Youth, Sustainability
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.