The study aimed at assessing the role of community driven development (CDD) on the empowering the youth. The study sought to find out the different CDD sub-projects; the approaches and methods in implementing CDD; the knowledge and skills utilization; Impact of CDD on youth‟s attitudes and behaviors change towards development and how it addressed youth challenges; and challenges faced during the CDD implementation for youth empowerment. The research methods used included among others descriptive cross-sectional study with a combination of qualitative and quantitative data methods. The area of the study was Akwang Sub-County, Kitgum District. The respondents of the study were the youth, local and the district leaders. The data collection techniques included the key informant interviews and/or in-depth interviews, questionnaires, FDGs, and documentary reviews covering two villages in each of the three parishes. The study findings revealed that the different CDD sub-projects carried out were brick making, training and teaching, football clubs, carpentry, agriculture, VSLA, poultry keeping and goats rearing. The study revealed that the approaches community uses were top down, bottom up, empowerment, and right based approaches respectively. The method identified were directive, non-directive, and integrated methods as mentioned by the youth. The skills utilization were mixed with the different CDD sub-projects. The study found out that the impact were creativity and innovation, sense of independence, self awareness, demands for further skills, carpentry works, and the challenges revealed by the study are poor education and training, inequality and exclusion, the cost of implementation, weak infrastructure, political interference, and land conflict. Evidently, with the different literature and the gaps cited in them, the most important contributions made by the study in fulfilling the gaps was that the development assistance should work for the benefit of youth (as target beneficiaries); with youth as partners; and be shaped by youth as leaders. The study showed that CDD does not cater to problems that are beyond the capacity of youth, because CDD is demand-driven, it tends to select communities that already have in kind commitments and planning capacity, this means that, in the absence of careful selection criteria, the poorest communities with limited capacity are crowded out. The process of CDD project sub-projects to reach approval or financial closure and receipts of funds lengthy and laborious. The District should provide practical vocational training to our youth to help reduce on the money oriented issues given as the CDD grants provisions by the District. There is need to improve and clarify the facilitation and funds released to local governments for CDD project implementation as well as improvement on the lack of adequate facilities to enable project implementation at the local government level.

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