Rethinking Youth Resilience: Beyond Skills and Preparedness

By: Shaberi Das, Researcher, Sound of Silence

How do young people imagine a future for themselves when they have few opportunities to discover what they are capable of? This is a question that conventional approaches to youth development and climate resilience often leave unanswered. The emphasis tends to fall on closing the skills gap and improving employability, as though the distance between training and a viable future were chiefly a skills deficit. In climate-vulnerable rural communities, however, the relationship between learning a skill and building a future is rarely straightforward: livelihoods are precarious, environmental risks constrain choices and migration may become a response to limited options. Young people need opportunities not only to acquire skills, but to put them into practice, contribute to collective life and see their efforts make a difference. Such experiences cannot compensate for the absence of viable livelihoods or overcome the structural inequalities that constrain choices. They do, however, raise an important question for development practice: what else must be made possible if young people are to move beyond being prepared for an uncertain future and participate in shaping it?

One way to explore this question is to look at the kinds of opportunities young people are able to engage with, including those that extend beyond conventional skills training. Through the Sound of Silence (SOS) project, these have taken different forms: football and physical exercise, eco-volunteering, access to information and opportunities through block-level Information Hubs, training in disaster management and nursery management, and experiential learning to sustain livelihood activities for the project’s youth group members. Although distinct in their immediate purposes, these activities offer young people different ways to participate, develop their abilities and engage with the world around them. Looking at them together allows us to consider what youth development can make possible beyond just preparation for employment.

Beyond the playing field

Fig. 1: Young community members build strength and teamwork through football training.

Relative to the other activities undertaken in the field, football, physical exercise and yoga may seem peripheral to a project concerned with climate risk. They do not protect a homestead from flooding or make a livelihood less vulnerable to a cyclone. Yet watching young people take part in team sports draws attention to the social and psychological capacities that are often overlooked when resilience is discussed mainly in terms of infrastructure, livelihoods and disaster preparedness: how young people learn to act alongside others under conditions that require judgement, coordination and a shared sense of responsibility. On the playing field, they must read situations as they unfold, respond to setbacks and negotiate the demands of individual performance and collective effort. 

Figs 2 & 3: (Top) Youth group members practice yoga for physical well-being and emotional balance; (Bottom) Youth group football players celebrate a hard-earned win in their school football league.

Some young people from the project communities have gone on to compete in external championships, carrying their abilities into unfamiliar settings and wider arenas of recognition. Such experiences may not, in themselves, establish lasting changes in confidence, capacity or future prospects. They do, however, create occasions for youth to encounter new challenges, engage with others beyond their familiar social worlds, assess their abilities against wider benchmarks, assume responsibility and see themselves as contributors rather than simply recipients of support.

The project’s nursery-management training brings these questions closer to the material conditions of everyday life. Forty girls and boys across four project blocks recently participated in a two-day programme covering seed collection, seed calendars, soil preparation, composting, vegetable seedling production, grafting, and the fundamentals of nursery costing and marketing. Some have since begun applying what they learned to improve the organic nutrition gardens in their backyards. More than sites where techniques can be put into practice, these gardens offer a setting in which technical knowledge meets the contingencies of cultivation, and where decisions about soil, seeds and seasonal timing result in immediate consequences. For those interested in taking the work further, the coming

agricultural season may open the possibility of producing vegetable and fruit seedlings for sale, with the project providing seeds to support their initial efforts.

Figs 4 & 5: (Left) Youth training in nursery management and seedling care; (Right) Applying nursery management skills in home gardens.

While establishing a viable nursery will depend on access to resources, continued guidance and the realities of local demand, the interval between training and earning a livelihood need not be an empty one. The efforts of the young people applying their newly acquired knowledge to their nutrition gardens illustrate that this interval can become a period of meaningful experimentation, in which they develop practical judgement, learn to recognise problems and discover what further support they need. In a landscape where salinity, flooding and shifting growing conditions complicate agricultural decisions, this capacity to work with local ecologies can support both livelihood development and adaptation to environmental change.

Similar learning through practice extends to other livelihood activities supported by the project, including organic agriculture, integrated farming, freshwater aquaculture and livestock care. While these interventions initially focused on strengthening women’s capacities, young people are also acquiring practical knowledge through observation, assistance and participation in everyday livelihood activities. Exposure to practices like natural farming, aquaculture training and livestock vaccination, helps them understand how to maintain crops and fish stocks, recognise animal health problems, and make better use of available resources across interconnected farming activities. This experience provides a foundation for young people to take on greater responsibility in household enterprises, apply sustainable farming practices and explore income-generating opportunities across agriculture, fish farming and livestock rearing. By building on existing household knowledge and skills, the project’s youth group members can develop concrete pathways towards livelihood participation and, over time, greater economic independence.

                                         Fig. 6: Young people practicing first aid techniques for emergency response.

Disaster-management training addresses another aspect of this relationship between knowledge and action. As part of this recent initiative, forty-eight young people were introduced to participatory vulnerability mapping, preparedness and precautions before a disaster, basic considerations during rescue, and measures to protect health after flooding, including safe drinking-water practices, sanitation and access to medical care. The programme was foundational rather than professional emergency-response training, and its longer-term value lies in young people gaining the knowledge and nurturing the capacity to make practical decisions that shape how households and communities experience a hazard. Knowing what to anticipate, how to reduce exposure to avoidable risks, and where to turn for support when ordinary systems of care are disrupted equips young people with the ability and confidence to inform community response to adverse events. 

Figs. 7 & 8: (Left) A young community member updates her local village weather board with 5-day weather forecast and agro-advisory; (Right) Youth building digital literacy through computer training at an Information Hub.

Access to block-level Information Hubs further connects young people to the information needed to navigate environmental risks and wider uncertainties. Through the Hubs, they access weather forecasts and hazard information and update community weather boards, helping make timely information available to others. They also access information about educational, livelihood and other opportunities, while developing their digital literacy. Together, these forms of engagement can strengthen their ability to interpret information, weigh options and make informed decisions – capacities that matter when environmental conditions are changing and the choices available to households are constrained.

An earlier phase of the project offers a more direct example of young people translating environmental awareness into community action. Following sessions on climate change, pollution and environmental protection, young people began organising cleanliness drives in their communities, introducing waste segregation practices at school, and marking World Environment Day through marches with posters and banners encouraging people to reduce plastic use. These initiatives offer early evidence of young people taking on the role of eco-volunteers, encouraging cleaner and more hygienic practices in their immediate surroundings. Moreover, they suggest how environmental learning can extend beyond individual awareness to a willingness to initiate and sustain action with others.

Figs. 9 & 10: Youth-led anti-plastic campaign (left) and community cleanliness drive (right) on World Environment Day 2025.

The project activities differ in their immediate purposes, but each illuminates a different relationship between ability and action. Sport creates occasions to exercise judgement and work towards shared outcomes; nursery management training and support brings technical knowledge into contact with ecological conditions and everyday decisions; disaster-management training introduces ways of anticipating hazards and limiting their consequences. None can be taken as evidence of empowerment in itself, and their contributions to resilience are therefore neither identical nor equally direct. Their greater significance lies in what they make possible beyond the activity: the scope to practise, to learn from consequences and, potentially, to take on roles that align with their aspirations for the future and the responsibilities that extend into community life.

Climate resilience depends not only on reducing exposure to hazards, but also on people’s capacity to make decisions, sustain livelihoods, draw on relationships and act when familiar conditions become uncertain. For young people, developing this capacity requires more than acquiring skills. It depends on access to resources, settings in which those skills can be tested, and opportunities to contribute in ways that are recognised and sustained. A nursery may develop into a source of income; disaster training and access to hazard information may support a more active role in community preparedness; experiences on a playing field may broaden a young person’s sense of their own competence. Even if none of these trajectories is assured, what matters is that the conditions exist for them to develop.

The making of agency

Fig. 11: Youth group meeting in a project village to discuss priorities and plan upcoming activities.

For young people growing up amid environmental and economic uncertainty, the future can seem like something to endure or adapt to, rather than something they can actively shape. Youth development initiatives must therefore concern themselves not only with how young people prepare for the demands ahead, but also with whether they can imagine possibilities beyond the paths already laid out for them. The youth-focused work of Sound of Silence, though still developing, raises a question that extends beyond the delivery of any individual activity: what would it take for young people’s emerging abilities to become a durable part of how they and their communities negotiate an uncertain future?

This question has implications for development planning beyond the project itself. Training numbers and immediate outputs can establish what an intervention has delivered, but reveal less about the capacities young people have developed and how these might shape their choices over time. The experience of SOS points to the importance of creating opportunities for young people to apply what they learn, exercise judgement and take on responsibilities from which a greater sense of agency may gradually emerge. It also underscores the value of understanding how young people themselves envisage their futures and what constraints stand in the way. A youth-focused intervention should, therefore, do more than prepare young people to adapt to the future as it stands. It should help widen the futures they can imagine and strengthen their capacity to shape it.