This project started from the assumption that policies and programmes developed in relation to poverty reduction and gender promotion are often viewed and evaluated from the perspective of adults. Thus, the voices of young people are silenced or undervalued. Therefore, the project sought to deconstruct the adult dominated narratives by elevating voices of young people in order to have a comprehensive picture of the problem at hand. It aimed to empower high school learners to detect and research issues of sustainable development in their communities, and to discuss and express these problems with members of local existing arts clubs with a view to bring these concerns to the attention of policy makers using-arts based approaches such as music, dance, drama, and drawings. The study used participatory action research and art- based research methods and achieved a number of outputs.
The project specifically sought:
1) To empower high school learners to research issues of sustainable development (poverty reduction and girls’ access to education) in their respective communities;
2) To create safe spaces in the form of clubs for young people and existing/local indigenous cultural artists to discuss and express researched issues of sustainable development;
3) To use existing local cultural forms and practices as a dialogic tool between high school learners, arts clubs and policy makers in discussing issues of sustainable development in the community;
4) To produce a youth-led national policy brief around key issues identified in relation to obstacles to poverty reduction and girls’ access to education; and
5) To draw lessons learnt from the use of arts-based approaches to dialogue issues of sustainable development.
A number of lessons were learnt from the use of arts-based approaches to dialogue issues of sustainable development. They include the following: