Desk Review of Programming Guidelines and Youth in Emergencies: Education, health, livelihoods & durable solutions

When humanitarian crises occur, youth and adolescent are often overlooked as a group with specific needs and concerns that need to be addressed in emergency responses. This desktop review is a systematic compilation of youth and adolescent programming for emergencies, organised by RET International, the Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network (MYAN Australia), the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the INEE Adolescents and Youth Task Team (AYTT). The review covers existing guidelines on education, health, livelihoods, and durable solutions in the following emergency situations: early emergency, protracted/acute crisis, early recovery and development nexus. While seeking to inform humanitarian practitioners on existing tools and programming for youth, the review also identifies gaps in how current emergency-related programming corresponds to the needs of crisis-affected youth.

The review finds that there is an overrepresentation of high-level stakeholder speeches by youth, while current humanitarian programming lacks concrete measures on how to respond to the concerns raised by youth. It also finds that adolescents are commonly grouped with children, and are not differentiated as a group with distinct needs. Furthermore, when looking at the stages of emergencies, there is a heavy focus on the early emergency and protracted stages, while the acute emergency stage is lacking, and the development nexus stage is nearly completely neglected. It stresses the need for future articulation of guidelines and programming that specifically prioritizes youth and adolescents throughout all stages of emergencies.