Youth continue to be amongst the most marginalised groups in Jordan with unemployment and exclusion from decision making being two major challenges. The importance of addressing youth needs and increasing their participation in local and national governance became a central concern for Jordan notably with the deterioration of the situation following COVID-19. The National Youth Strategy (2019-2025) and the Kings’ decree are two major steps taken to support young people and increase their presence in decision making.
The National Youth Strategy (2019-2025) outlines concrete steps to strengthen youth participation with a focus on increasing their presence in local governance. This is expected to be achieved through capacity building and offering opportunities for young people to directly work and intervene in public life affairs. In addition, to support young people, the King of Jordan commended local and national officials to engage more frequently and have youth participate in making decisions. The established royal commission for political reform was tasked with a job to come up with actionable recommendations to support youth participation and engagement in political affairs. Recommendations included decreasing the age of candidacy and working on a more decentralised decision-making process. This helped revitalise the political scene in Jordan granting people the opportunity to influence and participate in decision making.
In line with the National Youth Strategy (2019-2025), outlined by the MoY in Jordan and its objective to increase youth civic participation, Search implemented a project titled “Promoting Constructive Relationships between Youth and Local Authorities in Jordan”. The overall objective of the project is to strengthen youth participation in local governance by developing their skills to collaborate and negotiate with local authority (LA) members in order to achieve positive change on community-level issues.
Key Findings:
- The intervention was seen as relevant given that youth participation in local governance continues to be a challenge in Jordan despite the favourable contextual changes. The project’s two specific objectives are found to be essential. For instance, the insight collected shows that young people in Jordan are in need of capacity building with regard to their skills to participate in local governance (i.e., knowledge on the governing system in Jordan, communication skills, leadership skill, and advocacy campaign management).
- The project design was considered of high quality with sequential activities, contributing to the overall transformation aimed by the project objective. The project design utilises the learning by doing approach which, according to Hoskins et al. (2019), is essential to teach youth about participating in local governance.
