ABOUT

yut rise up

Yut Rise Up is a multi-year initiative aimed at stopping violence before it starts and strengthening healthy relationships in Vanuatu. The project creates safe and empowering spaces, both online and in person, for adolescents to speak and learn about respect and equality, challenge harmful norms, and actively create change in their communities. Through youth-led advocacy and positive personal action, Yut Rise Up supports young people to reject Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and promote healthier, more respectful relationships.

Yut Rise Up is implemented by Save the Children Vanuatu, in partnership with Youth Challenge Vanuatu and Wan Smolbag, under the leadership of the Ministry of Justice and Community Services through the Department of Women’s Affairs. The project is funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) under the COVID-19 Response for Affected Poor and Vulnerable Groups Project. Savvy Vanuatu is contracted by Save the Children Vanuatu to design and implement the youth-led online communications and advocacy campaign.

yut rise up

Project Components

The project takes a multi-pronged, socio-ecological approach to preventing GBV, recognising that change requires simultaneous action at multiple levels – individual, family, peer, community, and societal. Strategies and partnerships were implemented to ensure participation by adolescents with disabilities and to address diverse gender identities sensitively.

Adolescence is a critical life stage when attitudes towards gender, relationships, and power are still forming. Providing accurate information, positive role models, and skills such as communication, boundary-setting, and conflict resolution at this stage can prevent the entrenchment of harmful norms. By working with early adolescents, their parents and caregivers, and the wider community, the program aims to shift harmful gender and social norms, build protective skills, and foster supportive environments where young people, particularly adolescent girls are safe, and adolescents develop attitudes that value equal and respectful relationships.

At its core, the approach prioritises a combination of primary and early intervention e.g. a large-scale, population-wide intervention that targets adolescents to nurture safe and equal relationships. Key components of the program include adolescent workshops, parent and caregiver workshops. mentorship program, youth-led online communications and advocacy campaign, and short films. The priority remains to engage parents and caregivers, ensuring they receive similar messages to their children so that new ideas are reinforced at home and young people are supported to apply them in their daily lives.

Creating Positive, Generational Change

yut rise up is proudly led by an adolescent advisory group, ensuring that youth voices remain central throughout the project’s implementation. This project recognises and supports their role as active agents of transformation, through engaging with topics in the workshops and the campaign like gender equality, positive masculinities and femininities, and sexual and reproductive health and rights, adolescents are gaining the tools, confidence, and leadership to create safer, more inclusive communities starting now, not later.

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