Praxis Note 65. Turning voice into action

Including beneficiary voices in the design of development programmes is crucial to ensuring their success. While most development practitioners recognise this, we often struggle to do it in a meaningful way. At the Danish Children and Youth NGO Network (C&Y Network), we have begun using Action Research as a means of including the voices of children and young people in our programme design. This note reviews experiences from three Action Research studies conducted by the C&Y Network and discusses some important learning outcomes.

Using an Action Research approach in these studies provided an extremely valuable platform for engaging children, young people, and the C&Y Network’s partners in the research process. This ensured their voices were central to the studies and their results. Everyone involved learned a great deal, from research skills and better ways of engaging with children, to the value of collaboration and shared ownership of research.