USAID YOUTHPOWER Community Midline Report

The report covers the two and a half years of the project's five-year implementation period and provides reliable evidence of the program's impact on the youth and the community learning outcomes. The report highlights a positive increase in youth's awareness of existing avenues for youth engagement in the community, with 54% of the youth now aware of those services in their areas. This is an important sign for the Youth Power team that they are moving in the right direction. However, the perception of youth on the improvement of youth's opportunities for prosocial involvement in the community's activities may need more attention to ensure efforts are shown and translated in the civic engagement of youth. The report also shows that there is room to improve the utilization of the existing avenues for youth's positive engagement, as the findings showed that the reported percent of youth in the baseline was higher than the midline value by 2.8%. However, more youth stated that the quality of services are better than before, with around 50% of the surveyed youth saying that those available avenues are providing either excellent or very good services. The survey was filled out by 1029 females and 1056 males, with an average age of 19.5 years-old and the majority between 22-25 years old. The respondents were predominantly Jordanian citizens, with 87.4% identifying as Jordanian, followed by Syrians, Palestinians, and other nationalities. The report also highlights the educational level of the respondents, with around 56.5% currently enrolled in an educational institution, and 33.5% indicating that they were enrolled in an educational institution in the past but not anymore. The survey also showed that very low number of youth are currently enrolled in a vocational training, with around 131 youth enrolled. The Youth Power project aims to improve the quality of available services and positive opportunities for youth, and the report highlights the need for more services that provide opportunities for volunteerism work, skill building courses, job placement and internship opportunities, and educational centers and sports clubs for youth in the community. The methodology used to evaluate the program's progress was the same tool adopted at the beginning of the program, implemented through the Communities that Care Youth Survey (CTCYS) and a customized questionnaire to report on the indicators. The data was collected from each community type, including Jordanian citizens, Syrian refugees, Palestinians, and other nationalities in the targeted communities in Jordan. The report presents the results of the midline evaluation in relation to baseline findings, describing the impact of the program. The data was collected through tablets and processed and analyzed through Statistical Package for Social Sciences software (SPSS) and Microsoft PowerBI. The sample size was 2085 male and female youth, living across six targeted governorates, with a sample target based on the baseline sampling size determined by the Proportions Stratified sampling method. The report highlights the need for further development of the activities being implemented and the planning of new activities to ensure the project's overall goal and indicators are met. The Youth Power team can use the findings of this midline evaluation to inform further development of the activities and plan to conduct new activities if needed.