Essential Packages Manual: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Programmes for Young People

The Essential Packages Manual is designed to be a comprehensive guide for successful sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) programmes for young people. It seeks to help organisations to critically review programmes and identify gaps and areas to improve a programme in line with a rights-based, gender-transformative, and youth-centred approach. As stated in the manual, “It is a starting point for managers, programme officers, monitoring and evaluation staff and others to critically review their programmes against proven standards of good practice, to identify gaps and areas where they could improve to better serve young people, and to learn more about a holistic approach to programming that places young people at the centre.”

This second edition of the manual (see Related Summaries below for the first edition which was published in 2014) was developed and published as an end-product and legacy of the Access Services and Knowledge (ASK) programme, which was implemented from 2013-2015 by seven collaborating partners in seven countries in Africa and Asia (See Related Summaries below for more information on ASK).

The manual is divided into the following chapters:

1.  Introduction to the manual - offers background information, as well as some guidance on how to use the manual.

2.  A holistic, rights-based approach - provides an overview to holistic, rights-based youth-centred approaches. This section articulates a multi-component approach in which young people are placed at the centre of programmes that are designed to help them. It also unpacks four key values that are fundamental to employing a rights-based approach to sexual and reproductive health programmes and helps readers to view their interventions through a rights-based lens.

3.  Towards a youth-centred approach - explains what it means to place young people at the centre in your programme, why it is important and how it relates to youth empowerment. The chapter offers strategies that organisations can adopt to create conditions for successful youth participation and leadership, including an introduction to concrete steps that should be taken.

4. Working in partnership - addresses the question of why working in partnership may be the right solution to achieve your programmatic objectives, and provides an overview of exploring partnership options and managing one or multiple partnerships.

Chapters 5,6, and 7 focus on programmatic areas and are all structured in a similar way to support organisations to assess their programme/service and begin to think through steps they need to take to improve it.

5. Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) and SRHR information provision
6. SRHR services for young people
7. Creating an enabling environment

Each of these three chapters begins with some key definitions and discussions of that programmatic area, and this is followed by laying out the minimum and progressive standards. Any organisation delivering SRHR interventions to young people should be meeting the minimum standards, and the progressive standards include aspects of service and programme delivery that are beyond the bare basics but are considered good practice. Each of these chapters also includes the following tools:

• a self-assessment questionnaire to help users assess how well their programme/service is performing.
• a baseline mapping tool - a research tool to help organisations research their context; to map out the young people in their community, not only the obvious young people but also more marginalised young people, and the services and programmes available to them. This will help organisations to identify the gaps in service provision, and who might be missing out.
• guidance on planning and implementation- to support users to reflect on steps that are involved in bringing their programme up to minimum standard or to invest in improving their programme to achieve progressive standards.

Annex A: Key concepts and definitions
Annex B: Tools and resources