Using Innovative and Participatory Tools to increase Girls' Safety and Inclusion in Cities

This side event will promote the importance of ensuring a gender-sensitive, child-friendly, and child/youth participation implementation approach to the New Urban Agenda and the SDGs. The event will propose solutions for overcoming challenges in implementing the SDGs, especially Goal 11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities, and the New Urban Agenda, and to ensure that the WUF9 report takes into consideration girls' safety and inclusion in cities. The event will share tools and resources, which are adaptable, in order to enhance gender equality, inclusion, and sustainable development that can be utilised to achieve the New Urban Agenda and the SDGs.

The focus of the side event will be on using innovative and participatory tools to increase girls' safety and inclusion in cities and showcasing some of the global programme's resources and research initiatives. Various programme and research tools will be showcased, including the Mindcraft Block-by-Block approach, digital mapping tool 'Free To Be', and other social accountability processes, such as the girls safety walk, girls empowerment star, and social cartography tool. Information about these tools will be shared as well as successes and challenges with implementation. These tools have been widely tested and piloted in various settings, making them adaptable to different contexts. Adolescent girls will share their experiences of being involved in these programme and research tools and also share ideas for making their city safer and more inclusive for girls like them. Further details about these tools are outlined below.

Mindcraft and the Block-by-Block Methodology: Using Mindcraft and the Block-by-Block methodology to make cities safer and more inclusive for girls and also looking at how the methodology can be adapted to contribute to empower girls in the use of ICT and to better address underlying barriers and power dimensions, which hinder girls from accessing ICT.

Digital mapping tool 'Free To Be': 'Free To Be' is a digital mapping tool designed to empower young people to share the places they love, the places they avoid, and those that could be improved using digital technology.

Girls Safety Walk: The Girls Safety Walk tool allows girls to assess particular elements of the built and social environment that they feel contribute to or hinder their sense of safety. Girls then identify priority issues they would like to see addressed and offer recommendations for making their communities safer and more inclusive.

Girls Empowerment Star: The Girls Empowerment Star is a research tool used by girls to assess their safety and inclusion in cities. Specifically, girls share feedback on speaking up, participation, feeling safe in public spaces, feeling safe when using transportation, and feeling valued in their communities.

Social Cartography Tool: The Social Cartography tool is a creative and practical way of understanding girls' experiences and visions for their cities by asking girls to draw maps of their current neighbourhood as well as their visions for an ideal city.