This toolkit is about how youth can advocate strategically for gender equality and empowerment of young women. It highlights ways in which youth can influence decision-making at community, local and national levels to achieve gender equality. An important running thread through the toolkit is on engaging young men as gender equality advocates.
This toolkit is produced under UN Women’s Men and Women for Gender Equality Programme for Arab States, funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).
Why is this toolkit important?
The Arab region has witnessed phenomenal economic advances but gender equality and young women’s empowerment lags in the region. Young women in the region continue to face gender-based discrimination, marginalization and violence, restricted mobility, including unequal access to education and opportunities for leadership and participation.
Today a third of the population in the Arab States is young women and young men. This growing youth population can be a tremendous force for development and is essential for achieving gender equality.
The momentum around the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is also a historic opportunity to achieve gender equality. The global agenda must also deliver equal gains for youth. With this idea, the toolkit seeks to equip youth advocates in the region with tools and knowledge to ensure they can take full advantage of the opportunity that the SDGs offer to achieve gender equality by 2030.
Who is this toolkit for?
This toolkit is for individual young women and young men, youth-led groups, networks and movements, including youth-focused organizations and other community-based organizations (CBOs), that want to advocate for gender equality, empowerment of young women and engagement of young men as partners for gender equality in the region.
Whether you are an experienced advocate or with limited advocacy skills, this toolkit will be useful for you to become strategic in your advocacy to achieve gender equality by 2030.
How can use this toolkit?
The toolkit provides detailed information on basic concepts around gender equality, SDGs and advocacy planning as it is designed to be useful for youth groups and CBOs with varying levels of experience, capacities and skills in advocacy. For this reason, the toolkit does not provide a standard method on how to build an advocacy. Rather it consists of a number of tools, tips and guidance that you can put together in a winning mix that responds to your specific-situation.
This toolkit is designed as a self-guided manual. Young women and young men who are beginning their journey in advocacy may find it useful to go through the guidance and tools in detail in the presented sequence. If you have advanced advocacy skills, you might find value in specific-tips and guidance to get more ideas to make your ongoing advocacy more effective.
While the toolkit focuses on how youth can take the lead to advocate for gender equality, you can also adapt the advocacy guidance and tools across different youth agendas and contexts in the region.
You can download this toolkit for free here.
