Consultant – Youth-led Research Specialist

Founded over 20 years ago, Theirworld has grown to become a leading global children’s charity committed to the best start in life for children and young people by ending the education crisis and unleashing the potential of the next generation.

Theirworld’s Global Youth Ambassador (GYA) programme has a network of more than 2000 young people from over 140 countries around the world. GYAs are supported to advocate for education, taking their experiences and knowledge of their own communities and bringing it to power holders, making the case to unlock big change everywhere.

Threats to peace and security continue to disproportionately affect children and young people worldwide, with conflict, displacement, violence, and instability severely disrupting access to education. Education is not only a fundamental right, but also a powerful tool for peace building, prevention, recovery, and sustainable reconstruction.

The Peace, Security and Education Task Team brings together young leaders from the GYA network who are already using or seeking to use learning and education as pathways to peace building in their communities. Theirworld’s Task Team model is designed to:

• Build the leadership capacity of young people with lived experience of peace and security challenges
• Support and advance youth-led peace building initiatives that use education and learning
• Generate youth-led evidence and recommendations through a global consultation process
• Elevate youth voices in peace and security discourse and policy making at national, regional, and global levels

A core component of the Task Team’s work is a two-stage global youth consultation embedded within the wider project design. The consultation aims to generate evidence grounded in young people’s lived experiences of peace, security, and education; identify youth-led actions contributing to peace and stability; strengthen young people’s role as legitimate contributors to peace and security discussions; and produce youth-informed inputs for a flagship global report.

The consultation will reach young people aged 18–30 globally. Stage One of the process uses a global qualitative survey to map youth perspectives, experiences, and existing practices, prioritising broad participation. Stage Two will build on these findings through focus group discussions led by Task Team members in their communities, validating insights and exploring what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to change.

The consultation approach is youth-led with young people actively involved in designing questions, facilitating discussions, analysing findings, and shaping recommendations.

Working alongside the Theirworld Youth Team, the consultant will provide technical leadership and support for the design and implementation of the youth consultation led by the Peace, Security and Education Task Team. The consultant will play a facilitative role, ensuring that the process remains youth-led, well-structured, and aligned with project objectives, while maintaining coherence, adhering to Theirworld’s safeguarding policy and upholding quality throughout.

The consultant will be responsible for the following:

• Creating a clear delivery framework for the youth-led consultation on young peoples’ role in peace building efforts and how they’re impacted by peace and security instability, ensuring alignment with the overall project objectives and timelines
• Lead in the design of the two-stage consultation approach, ensuring clarity of purpose, logical sequencing, and feasibility
• Design consultation tools, including qualitative surveys (using existing Theirworld tools, such as Salesforce) and focus group discussion guides, in collaboration with the Youth Team (staff) and Task Team members (Global Youth Ambassadors)
• Develop a simple and robust data analysis system, organising data collected across the different consultation stages and input gathering tools
• Lead on the design and delivery of sessions (regular virtual meetings and one in-person workshop) for Task Team members to analyse and interpret survey questions and findings.
• Provide technical support to the Youth Team and Task…