Juvenile justice
Supporting youth at risk: a policy toolkit for middle income countries
What are the core policies that can prevent children and young people engaging in risky behaviour?
Authors:
W. Cunningham; L. M. Cohan; S. Naudeau
Publisher:
World Bank, 2009
Young people constitute a disproportionately large part of the world’s poor, representing nearly nearly 60 percent of the poor in developing countries. This policy toolkit on youth at risk in middle-income countries examines core policies which have an established track record in preventing disadvantaged children and young people from engaging in risky behaviour and, the authors argue, should form the basis of any country’s youth portfolio.
The toolkit takes a look at promising approaches which focus on helping those affected by risky behaviour to recover and return to a safe, productive path to adulthood. Young people in this category range from school dropouts to the incarcerated and are more difficult to reach than others in their age group. Although not as many of the interventions in this category have been evaluated, there is sufficient evidence to provide recommendations.
The toolkit then considers general policies with a disproportionately positive effect on youth at risk and present strategies and tools for turning these policy recommendations into a well-designed and well-implemented youth portfolio.
It specifically addresses the following areas:
- How to assign and coordinate institutional responsibilities based on comparative advantage
- How to reallocate resources away from ineffective programs toward recommended programs
- Ways in which development, analysis, and use of data for programme monitoring and impact evaluations can be improved
- How to select programmes based on cost-effectiveness and a cost-benefit analysis
- How to benchmark progress against international data sources.
