Integrating global and local best practices for youth development afterschool: Constructing the Kilimanjaro extracurriculars self-assessment

School extracurricular activities are an important site for positive youth development in low-resource international contexts due to their relative accessibility and community relevance. Such activity programs can simultaneously illuminate local best practices and learn from research in other contexts where positive youth development research is more prevalent. This article draws on action research with secondary schools in the Kilimanjaro Region of northern Tanzania to offer a process for integrating local and global best practices into a self-assessment tool for extracurricular activity program leaders. The collaborative process involved exploratory case study research on local best practices and focus group workshopping with local practitioners to adapt existing tools created elsewhere. A main purpose of the research was to create a tool that would be concise and appropriate for use in Kilimanjaro, while also conceptualizing a process that could be used to understand the potential value of extracurricular activities in other low-resource international contexts. The final Kilimanjaro Extracurriculars Self-Assessment (KESA) is offered as an open-access resource, but the main result is an approach for integrating the global and the local to promote constructive reflection for youth development practitioners in low resource settings. © 2021 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.