Young Men Initiative (YMI) — CARE Balkans' School-Based Community Mobilisation Against Gender-Based Violence

Launched in 2007, the Young Men Initiative (YMI) is coordinated by CARE International Balkans and adapts Promundo's Program H curriculum into a school-based programme for adolescent boys in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia. An initial voluntary after-school pilot (2007–2010) in five cities showed promising attitude shifts, but the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), which evaluated the programme, found the voluntary format limited participation.
In Phase II (2011–2013), CARE made basic YMI sessions a compulsory part of the school curriculum and added voluntary offsite retreats for more intensive engagement, rolling the revised model out in schools in Sarajevo, Zagreb and Belgrade.
ICRW's Phase II endline evaluation found the share of students disagreeing with the statement "I will start fighting if someone is disrespecting my friends or family" rose from 42% at the start of the school year (fall 2012) to nearly 67% by the endline, with sample attrition of 7–26% across sites; a peer-reviewed qualitative study (Journal of Gender Studies) similarly found participants describing a shift away from violence-justifying notions of masculinity.
Independent reviews of gender-transformative programmes for adolescents note that YMI and similar interventions have shown clearer evidence of attitude change than of behaviour change. CARE has continued the approach regionally as "Program Y" (Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, 2018–2020), embedding it further within Ministries of Education and Youth.

Read the full analysis: https://youngmeninitiative.net/en/