How a digital world can educate and empower youth - in pictures

Voices of Youth was originally set up by UNICEF as an online space for young people to learn more about issues affecting their world including education, environment, violence, war and conflict, poverty and hunger, health, HIV & AIDS and human rights. Since then it has developed into an interactive digital world that:
1. Promotes cross-cultural discussions between adolescents. Voices of Youth Connect
2. Gathers information to help raise awareness of the opportunities and risks that social media and digital tools present to young people. Voices of Youth Citizens
3. Provides a technology platform for young people to created targeted maps to communicate about their living conditions. Voices of Youth Maps
Photograph: Pirozzi

Voices of Youth Connect in Madagascar provides young people with a specially-designed curriculum, action guides and platform for exchange, allowing them to investigate issues in their communities. They then report their discoveries through traditional and digital media and mobilise their communities for change.
Photograph: UNICEF Madagascar/Delannoy

Children in Madagascar take part in a Voices of Youth Connect session in the National Park of Ranomafana. The children live in areas around national parks and focus on topics of biodiversity and conservation. During the session they take photographs of the landscape around them and share them digitally.
Photograph: UNICEF Madagascar/Delannoy

Kenya is one of several countries around the world where UNICEF is taking a closer look at the opportunities and risks that access to digital technology presents for young people, as part of the Voices of Youth Citizens initiative.
Photograph: UNICEF Kenya/Huxta

In 2010 UNICEF launched the Voices of Youth Citizens project which promotes the use of digital media and technologies to advance the rights of children in developing countries, while at the same time advocating measures to minimise the risks they can pose.
Photograph: UNICEF Kenya/Huxta

Through Voices of Youth Maps in Haiti, an initiative was set up which trained 24 adolescents to digitally map communities to raise awareness of environmental issues and identify risks specifically affecting them as young people including HIV infection and sexual abuse.
Photograph: UNICEF/Dormino

Fifteen year old Anderson is one of the 24 adolescents who have been trained to use a digital mapping platform developed by UNICEF, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters in order to create an interactive map about living conditions in two vulnerable communities in Port au Prince, Haiti, Cite Plus and Village de Dieu. The canal is categorized as having sanitation problems.
Photograph: UNICEF/Dormino

Sixteen year old Billy, trained to use the UNICEF GIS digital mapping platform, is part of the initiative created by UNICEF, in collaboration with two Haitian organizations, GHESKIO Center and the National Office against Violence and Criminality, to digitally map two vulnerable communities in Haiti. The area is categorised under ‘dangerous zones’ on the digital mapping platform.
Photograph: UNICEF/Dormino

Can a digital map created by young people change a community? To help strengthen the resilience of vulnerable locations within communities in Rio de Janeiro, in 2011 UNICEF Brazil launched a programme that empowers children, adolescents and young people to create maps on which they capture risks and hazards in their surroundings. Young people in Moro de Borel, one of 11 communities where digital maps are amplifying the voices of adolescents, have mapped environmental hazards such as unoccupied buildings and loose electrical wiring, which have in turn been addressed by local authorities.
Photograph: UNICEF Brazil/CEDAPS/Danatas

A youth-led digital mapping project has been running in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil since 2011 and is still having a large positive impact on the mapped communities. The themes explored included sanitation and accumulation of rubbish. The mapping project model has been an inspiration for the Safe and Sustainable Cities initiative, UN Habitat & UN Women, focusing on theme of violence against women and girls in Brazil.
Photograph: UNICEF Brazil/CEDAPS/Danatas