Our team has worked in 15 countries on projects that are centered around young people and the subjects that matter the most to them; sexual and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, livelihoods, and mental health.

Since YLabs was founded in 2016, we have built a wide array of products and services including a mobile and web app that helps young people in Rwanda explore questions about sex, relationships, and contraception through narrative storylines; supportive services to help young entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses in Africa’s digital economy, and new service models to support adolescents to stick to their HIV medication and plan for their financial future.

Here are the values that define our work, keep us mission-aligned, and shape our partnerships and projects.

Design with youth, not for youth

This is core to our work at YLabs. Young people are the experts in their own lives. It’s that simple. We believe that the most effective pathway to sustainable, equitable change is to put decision-making power in young people’s hands. Young people are part of YLabs’ design and research teams working to engage youth at every phase of our design and research process, whether it’s developing storylines for educational content or measuring outcomes in their communities.

Appreciate complexity

Our work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the real world, and the real world is complex. At every stage of our process, from design research to evaluation, we work hard to appreciate the complexities of contexts we work in and the communities we get to work with. This includes working to understand the ecosystem of influences that young people exist within, and designing interventions that keep the concerns and needs of parents, providers, and other potential “gatekeeper” stakeholders in mind.

Blend expertise to solve tough problems

If we are all the same, we have the same blind spots. Our project teams are more like coalitions; they are made up of youth leaders, physicians, designers, behavioral scientists, public health professionals, and epidemiologists. This helps to create the perfect blend of expertise to explore and tackle the topics that matter the most to young people.

Embrace bold thinking

Welcome to YLabs; wild ideas welcome! By supporting the conditions, mindsets, and safety to support young people’s creative power, we believe that audacious, bold, never-been-done-before ideas can emerge. From there, it’s time to test, iterate and implement in the real world.

Measure what we do

How do you get from a wild idea to a powerful innovation that has an impact on youth at scale? We are committed to rigorously evaluating our work in the world, so we can be accountable to the young people we work with and support them to build a better tomorrow. Working with our in-house team of researchers and epidemiologists, we use quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods to understand what works, what to change, and what to drop. By sharing our successes (and failures!) with our communities of practice in global adolescent health and beyond, our research team seeks to grow the evidence base on effective interventions to improve young people’s health and prosperity.

Create lovable and lasting solutions

Sustainability is built into every phase of our design process. We need our interventions to be just as successful in the future as they are today, which means ensuring local community ownership, financial feasibility, and local sourcing of materials. Through local leadership of the participatory design and research process and building relationships with youth and their communities from day one, we make sure that our products and services will be adopted, loved, and innovated upon by the people who need and use them. For us, sustainability also means considering climate impact, local acceptability and ownership, and financial feasibility.

Find out how our values translate to our work by exploring our most recent design and research projects.