In Palestine, GAGE research explores young people’s multidimensional capabilities and how the opportunities and risks they face as they move through adolescence and into young adulthood vary according to certain characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity, location residence (camp versus non-camp, Gaza versus West Bank), and disability and marital status. GAGE research also focuses on the programming and services available to young people, and how their uptake impacts individuals’ trajectories over time. 
 

There have been five phases of GAGE research in Palestine. First, in 2016, in collaboration with the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Culture and Free Thought Association, GAGE conducted a participatory action research study with 35 adolescents living in Gaza to explore the challenges and opportunities they face growing up in a chronically conflict-affected context. Young participants met on a weekly basis with GAGE research facilitators to undertake a wide range of research activities, including peer-to-peer interviewing and participatory photography and videography.
 

 Photo of the collage prepared by the young GAGE researchers 

In 2017 and 2018, GAGE undertook qualitative research in Gaza focused on adolescents’ broader capabilities and how the services available to young people do or do not support the development of their capabilities. This research included 239 adolescents and 69 service providers. Careful attention was paid to services’ gender- and disability-responsiveness.
Also in 2017 and 2018, GAGE undertook a study, using specially adapted tools, to explore the lives of adolescents with disabilities living in Gaza and the West Bank. This research included 24 adolescents with varying types of disability as well as 40 disability-focused key informants.

In 2020, GAGE collaborated with other organisations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and Ford Foundation, to conduct several rounds of mixed-methods research (in both Gaza and the West Bank) to explore the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on Palestinian young people’s lives. GAGE used surveys with 1,000 adolescent girls and boys, and qualitative and participatory methods to track how the pandemic affected different groups of adolescents in different ways over the first year of the public health crisis.

In 2024, to explore how the ongoing war on Gaza is affecting young people’s well-being, GAGE began conducting mixed-methods research with 1,011 adolescents living in Gaza. GAGE is looking at the lived experiences of young people during the war and the key challenges they are facing, including poverty, food security, health and nutrition, education, psychosocial well-being, and exposure to violence. The research is also exploring what support (formal or informal) young people are receiving. 
 

In Palestine, across the five phases of research, GAGE has employed mixed methods that include quantitative surveys and qualitative and participatory methods (including diaries, photography, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and key informant interviews). The methods GAGE uses in each instance are dictated by the aims of the particular phase of research and how that research is able to be paired with existent data collected by the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics. Data has been collected from young people, their caregivers, and myriad key informants, including educators, health care professionals, government officials, and NGO service providers.

GAGE research, across all five phases, underscores the complex and interlinked challenges that prevent adolescents developing their full capabilities in the Palestinian context. Decades of intermittent conflict (and now full-on war), pervasive unemployment and poverty, age-related hierarchies, restrictive gender norms, and disability-related stigma have truncated the trajectories of most Palestinian young people. 

Although access to education prior to the war was high, girls’ education was often supported only as a means of ensuring their competent motherhood (as women are rarely allowed to work outside the home), and boys were regularly forced to simultaneously juggle education and paid work, to bolster household incomes. 

Adolescents are also exposed to myriad forms of violence – in the home, at school, in the community, and from war. They have few opportunities to contribute even to the decisions that shape their own lives, and especially since the outbreak of war in 2023, they have extraordinarily high levels of psychosocial distress with only the most limited access to support, given that parents and other adults are also highly stressed. 

Girls’ vulnerabilities are amplified by social norms that mandate their silence and obedience, leaving them isolated at home and lonely, and at risk of child marriage and intimate partner violence. Widespread beliefs that disability is a sign of divine disfavour mean that adolescents with disabilities are regularly excluded from ‘normal’ life, often even within their own families.

GAGE research suggests that providing better support to Palestinian young people will require a multi-layered, multisectoral approach – one that begins with ending the war and rebuilding the infrastructure, the economy, and the services on which young people and their families depend. This must include scaled social assistance and more effective social protection programmes, catch-up education, and psychosocial first aid. Programming must proactively target the most vulnerable adolescents and young people, including those with disabilities and married girls.