Developing a Youth-Leadership Programme for Deaf Children in, and beyond, South Africa

This project will apply research findings from AH/R005354/1 (Changing the Story: Building Civil Society with and for young people in post-conflict settings) in a new context, namely to work with deaf children. This will allow us to generate significant new, and previously unanticipated, impact at three levels: within communities of vulnerable deaf children across Ekurhuleni, South Africa, within the agencies that support these young people, and at child-welfare and protection policy-level, working nationally in South Africa with the Department of Social Development and internationally with the UN, the EU and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

Changing the Story has interrogated how CSOs across 12 LMICs have sought to address the issue of youth engagement, looking at the ways in which arts-based programming, in particular, can be designed to foster better youth-ownership of development outcomes. We have commissioned and evaluated 21 youth-designed and youth-led projects that have sought to amplify the voices of young people to effect change in a wide range of contexts and at a number of levels. In Zimbabwe, for example, we worked with young street artists to advocate for human rights of the minority Tonga community, in South Africa we have used participatory filmmaking to raise awareness of (inter alia) the plight of the 'undocumented' children of illegal migrants, or of gender-based violence, focussing on questions of youth voice, or in Rwanda we have used grass-roots, participatory practices to shape the national curriculum.

Our research has sought to innovative CSO practice in two ways. On the one hand, we have explored youth-led participatory methodologies, highlighting the importance of taking a situated approach to cultural production, emphasizing the relationship between artistic product and social context. This is often ignored in participatory projects that tend to focus far more on the process of engagement itself, and in so doing often ignore a key motivation for participation. On the other, our work highlights the structural implications of participation. While the notion of engaging young people in project design is increasingly common place, Changing the Story has emphasized making programmes fundamentally accountable to young people. This is more unusual in development projects, where accountability to the funder generally remains the priority. Thus, our project has contributed to the growing literature on 'downward accountability' and the ways in which supporting young people to shape organisational practice can not only improve development outcomes and increase value for money, but also overcome the much discussed phenomenon of 'donor fatigue' (Waddington 2020). Examples from our research of particular relevance to this present proposal include 'youth-led community assessments', piloted by a number of the Changing the Story projects and used to facilitate dialogue between CSOs, the young people they support and wider stakeholders in order to hold CSOs to account for the services they provide.

In proposed project we will:

1) Foster integration of deaf children and develop their self-advocacy skills. We will revisit learning from our earlier work in South Africa in order to create an arts-based leadership programme in partnership with Hope and Homes for Children (HHC), DeafKidz International (DKI), Deaf SA and the Bishop Simeon Trust (BST).

2) Support relevant agencies to develop more inclusive practices. Working in partnership with DKI and Deaf SA, we will help BST and HHC to build organisational capacity. The project will provide them with new skills, and new approaches to programme design, helping them to integrate and support deaf children more effectively across their programmes.

3) Support youth-led South-South knowledge exchange to inform child-welfare and protection policy nationally and internationally.