Chevening Leadership and Influence Essay Example: Youth inclusion program officer

Reviewing attendance records for a youth skills pilot serving roughly 120 participants, I noticed young women were dropping out at nearly twice the rate of male participants, with no reasons recorded. A program that cannot explain who leaves cannot honestly claim to include them, so I decided to find out why. I ran small feedback sessions with current participants and separate meetings with parents whose daughters had stopped attending. Three problems emerged: travel after dark felt unsafe, families doubted the program was appropriate for young women, and the schedule had been set without consulting anyone. I brought these findings to the team and pushed for three changes: shifting sessions to daytime hours, adding a parent orientation before enrollment, and creating a referral pathway to Nisa Helpline, a local women's support organization, for participants who raised safety concerns. Neither change was straightforward. Trainers preferred evening slots and the venue charged more for daytime use. I prepared a short evidence note linking dropout timing to session hours and used it in both negotiations. I also designed and delivered the parent orientation myself across two enrollment cycles so the team could test it without extra burden. Of the 14 families initially refusing permission, 9 allowed re-enrollment after attending. Female attendance in the following cycle rose from 54 percent to 71 percent, and recording dropout reasons became a standard step in the team's intake process. I still need to learn how to structure that kind of evidence note more rigorously, particularly how to separate correlation from cause when sample sizes are small. I want to develop that skill through training in monitoring and evaluation methods, then use it to help similar pilots in my organization build dropout-tracking tools before problems become invisible.