IREX and Partners to Implement USAID’s Youth Excel: Our Knowledge, Leading Change

Youth Excel is a global program that will empower young people and youth organizations to use implementation research to strengthen local, national, and global development solutions.

Youth Excel will support young leaders and youth-led and youth-serving organizations around the globe to conduct quality implementation research; use data and learnings to improve their own cross-sectoral, positive youth development programs; synthesize data and learning; and engage in intergenerational dialogue with adult decision-makers so that together youth and adults can shape and advance data-informed development policies, agendas, and programs.

Implementation research is a mixed-methods approach to collecting data during program implementation to improve implementation. Implementation research helps teams learn how to adapt tested programs to new contexts, how to scale and achieve cost-effectiveness, and how to strengthen impact.

Youth Excel addresses USAID’s, IREX’s, and our consortium’s shared imperative to empower young people to solve local, national, and global development challenges using data-driven and research-based approaches. This partnership will build the global knowledge base on cross-sectoral youth development, support USAID’s Global LEAD initiative, expand USAID’s YouthLead network, and advance USAID’s Journey to Self-Reliance agenda on sustainable local development.