The effectiveness of youth participation in post-disaster responses: The case of the 2015 Nepal earthquake

Abstract: Focusing on the rising attention towards including the local population in humanitarian action, this study demonstrates how youth participation can produce effective results in a humanitarian response, making use of the post-disaster response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake as a case study. The research was intended to investigate the specific factors that enable youth participation to produce effective results in humanitarian programming, examining the methods that organisations used to involve youth, the benefits and challenges that arose from the process, and how effectiveness could be measured for the purpose of qualitative analysis. After constructing a conceptual framework around the key themes of the study, the thesis analysed the findings from 3 in-depth semi-structured interviews with informants from Restless Development Nepal, an organisation that actively involved youth volunteers in its emergency response. The activities which included these youth volunteers, most notably those that involved working closely with the local community through community mobilisation, benefitted from three main qualities embodied by the volunteers, these being their availability, flexibility and embeddedness within their own localities. The prior expertise of the implementing organisation in working with youth was another factor contributing to the programme outputs, as they possessed the social network and resources necessary to quickly train and mobilise the volunteers. The effectiveness of youth participation, which was measured not only through an examination of the programme results, but also through an assessment of how well the participatory activities managed to achieve the intended purposes of participation discussed in theoretical texts, revealed the possibility of youth participation in humanitarian responses to contribute to improving operational functions while still leading to self-empowerment and inner growth. The actual capacity of each organisation to include youth in their responses, however, is a defining factor in the methods in which youth may be able to use their inherent capabilities to contribute to the effectiveness of any operation.