In 2018, The Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents Hub (“Accelerate Hub”) established TAG groups in Kenema, Sierra Leone and Entebbe, Uganda. In 2019, these expanded to the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, and in 2020 to Kisumu, Kenya. Each of these TAGs aimed to:

• Co-generate empirical data;
• Build methodological ‘co-laboratories’ where participatory and arts-based methods are developed and tested in partnership with adolescents and young people (AYP); and most importantly,
• Shift power during the research process.

TAG engages with qualitative, arts-based and participatory methods to gather context-specific information and to explore the subjective experiences and stories of participants. This approach was premised on the belief that when young people are meaningfully engaged in research, the research and resulting policy and programming is more responsive to their priorities and needs.

The first TAG weekend in 2008 gained adolescent input into the Young Carers Study (2009-2012, n=8,500). The group was a mix of prior research participants, adolescents at schools and those recruited through word of mouth. It provided two important foundations for the work of TAG:

• Adolescents stressed the importance of meeting with other adolescents with similar highly stigmatized life experiences, away from their homes.
• They also requested follow-up meetings each year.

Since then, TAGs of 15–25 adolescents have aimed to meet annually in weekend, activity-based workshops. The groups have become multi-generational due to older adolescents having children, with many of the initial participants taking on leadership roles as camp leaders. Due to COVID-19 these meetings were not possible – we therefore started remote engagement in 2020. Reflections, resources and empirical findings on AYP experiences and perspectives from this recent pandemic period are highlighted throughout this page.

In 2022, in support of the National Department of Basic Education’s new Policy on the Prevention and Management of Learner Pregnancy in Schools, we ran a participatory “design incubator” workshop to collaboratively identify supportive features of programmes for pregnant and parenting learners in South African schools.
Our research team was also an invited panelist in an online interactive workshop on working with youth advisory groups (see the blog here).
At the end of 2022, the team was awarded the Changing Policy and Practice grant from the Medical Research Foundation (UK), for a project titled ‘Improving health outcomes amongst pregnant and parenting adolescent learners in South African schools: from evidence into action’. It will apply participatory methodology and structured dialogues to systematically interpret research findings from HEY BABY, and facilitate school-level action planning to support pregnant and parenting learners, to promote health and education outcomes. Read more here.

In 2023, young research advisors from EC TAG were invited to co-develop methodology with our research team towards ethical closure and conclusion of four
years (between 2019-2023) of collaborative participatory research focused on health,
development, resilience and well-being. An invited book chapter formed the foundation
for participatory engagement and TAG group closure, and will be published in 2024. Participatory methods were explored and applied with the group of 13 young research advisors aged 20-24 years, providing and utilising creative materials in multiple youth-friendly settings. Choice of method; data co-generation, analysis and interpretation; and writing of the collaborative book chapter were codirected by TAG young advisors, and took place across four iterative gatherings. The gatherings varied from one-day focused workshops to a three-day residential analysis and writing retreat, and concluded with small working group gatherings guided by themes identified in the analysis. In this book-chapter process, the role that advisors previously played shifted from participants and advisors to researchers: undertaking each step in the research process themselves, with continuous support and mentorship from our research team. The team’s researcher-facilitators also became participants, aiming for their experiences to complement those of TAG advisors in the final chapter. Throughout 2023, participatory work engaged with patchwork ethnography as both a method and a theory and included slow and re ective processes of co-research and continuous informed consent. The closing ceremony in December 2023 was a gathering of all young advisors who participated in EC TAG, and their close relatives. Guests participated in creative activities as well as a visual exhibition, commemorating and celebrating EC TAG’s outputs and achievements since its founding in 2019.