Building Student Change Agent Capabilities: Case UniWASH in Uganda

In this chapter, we examine youth-led innovation in the context of a recent multi-stakeholder development project, in which university students from Uganda and Finland collaborated to generate solutions to water and sanitation problems faced by schoolchildren in Northern Uganda. We focus on the project’s impact on developing change agent capabilities among the participating students and discuss the practical implications for the design and facilitation of similar initiatives. With a view to contributing to the planning of similar initiatives in the future, we propose a framework depicting the approaches and principles applied in this project and their relevance toward the acquisition of individual capabilities and social competencies underpinning critical change agency and responsible leadership.