To address the needs, build the agency, advance gender-responsive, and rights-based approaches to youth development programming. This includes developing the capacity of young people/rights holders(target groups) in all their diversity around the world to claim their rights, and duty bearers(government institutions) to meet their obligations. The Youth Cafe recognizes that unequal power relations and social exclusion deny people their human rights and often keep them in poverty.

Projects at The Youth Cafe should have an effective strategy for sustainability and self-reliance. This includes building sufficient technical capacity, skills, and competencies for diversified revenue and funding streams to act as agents of our own development, and nurturing relationships with and searches for future potential partners in coordination with our advisors and Partners.

The Youth Cafe’s projects should be based on research, learning, and adaptation, be data-informed using accessible data collection and analysis techniques, have solid and innovative evidence methods; be documented and regularly monitored and evaluated to determine changes associated with them. Ultimately, we hope to create spaces for reflection and constructive feedback loops, and to generate new project ideas, and adapt our processes and materials based on lessons learned.

To build partnerships, and scale-up potential, partner with young people to build a better, more resilient Africa while linking the region and the world, our projects must, whenever possible, have a multi-stakeholder and cross-sector approach where they draw concrete links between younger and older generations on one hand, and Africa and other regions on the other, enabling exchanges and relevant content for all generations, building networks, and coalitions, including cooperation with “unusual” or underutilized actors such as those in the private sector and media players(mainstream and digital), and sharing costs with other actors whenever possible as well as mutual learning, maximizing synergies to avoid duplications and jointly searching for solutions.