The Youth Cafe is part of the IREX led consortium implementing Youth Excel, which is a 5-year USAID-funded program. The Youth Excel will support young leaders and youth-led and youth-serving organizations around the globe to conduct quality implementation research; use data and learnings to improve their own cross-sectoral, positive youth development programs; synthesize data and learning; and engage in intergenerational dialogue with adult decision-makers so that together youth and adults can shape and advance data-informed development policies, agendas, and programs.

As part of the Youth Excel implementation research activity, The Youth Cafe will conduct a 6-month project activity that is seeking to equip young people with key media literacy skills: critical thinking, fact-checking, online safety, social media verification, and quality assessment of online information and their sources through a dedicated handbook.

Now more than ever, we need to enhance the fact-checking skills of the youth to restore eroded trust by fake news, improve their civic online reasoning and encourage responsible social media usage among the youth particularly in the context of election periods in a bid to reduce political incitement, political strife, tarnished political images and hate speech.

These skills are important in restoring and consolidating democracy in Kenya where evidence shows that digital tools and social media networks have been used to spread distorted narratives to shape public opinions. Through designing, developing, evaluating, and disseminating a youth-centered media literacy handbook, we hope to address digital threats to democracy in Kenya.

Conceived in a digital age where social media empowers propaganda, this IR activity seeks to respond to the need to enhance young people's online civic citizenship in the face of targeted disinformation by launching a handbook that might help build their analytical competencies to distinguish between facts from falsehoods. The Youth Cafe is dedicated to building a culture of fact-checked youth-digital citizenship.

Description of The Youth Cafe’s implementation research project.

In 2021 we’re zooming in on the relationship between media and election participation among young people, show its importance, and explore the principles and role of media and information literacy in meaningful youth civic engagement. As a result, through this partnership, we will undertake collaborative inquiry with a wide range of youth-led organizational partners, utilize peer-to-peer networks, catalyze conversations and encourage the inclusion of diverse youth voices in conversations about digital misinformation in the 2022 Kenyan election.

The project will be piloted in the Embakasi location in Nairobi and later be scaled to other counties. Embakasi will be prioritized in the pilot because it has the following characteristics based on a research paper on voting behavior among young people in Kenya and the state of Embakasi according to other reports.

Based on research, misinformation rates and intimidation are significantly high especially because of gangs such as the “jeshi la Embakasi” that existed since the 1990s read more. Interestingly, the Proportion of Youth Voters is 0.64 making Embakasi position two out of 794 Constituencies (source: Mzalendo). A youthful and politically active population is desirable for the project. 92% of the youth have access to mobile phones making the project viable.

To be able to track the changes in attitudes, behavior, and media literacy skills of the engaged youths in the Embakasi location, we are envisioning doing the project in 3 phases; Pre-election, during the election, and post-election periods.

Key activities currently happening

As part of the project design phase, we are currently conducting a desk review which involves the collection, organization, and synthesis of available information. This process allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the country’s context, and identify gaps to address during the handbook development.

We are also mapping out and engaging interesting stakeholders such as institutions of higher education, digital media companies, Kenyan libraries, youth-led/youth-serving organizations, government institutes, etc. These stakeholders are critical as they will be engaged in the validation of the handbook and the dissemination activities.

Lastly, we are recruiting youth researchers and youth ambassadors, who are an integral part of the design and implementation of the project. The researchers will be involved in the data collection, cleaning, and analysis while the ambassadors will be involved in supporting outreach and partnership opportunities, act as points of contact, and support monthly data collection surveys.

Other key activities we plan to undertake

We aim to integrate implementation research in our project and learning questions, we will utilize persona creation approaches to frame, develop and refine project learning questions and illuminate key issues. These approaches will use an inclusive and participatory human-centered design, a process that starts with understanding the people we are designing for this project and ends with tailor-made solutions to suit them.

Moreover, we intend to conduct training for diverse youth organizations and young people. The project capacity building for end-users is designed to ensure effective and optimized use of the handbook, particularly in most affected and vulnerable areas like rural and informal settlements.

The handbook will employ a youth-led, modular, and creative training framework that can easily be integrated along with other subject matters like human rights and gender equality. Thus, it will allow actors (youth organizations, policymakers, information, and media practitioners) to co-implement the toolkit while embracing human-centered training modules. Capacity-building Workshop(s) will further support creative collaborations with a focus on civic outcomes.

The most exciting activity will be the Kenya Media Literacy Week inspired by UNESCO’s media literacy week. The theme of the week will be "Addressing the effects of disinformation in youth civic engagement"

Some of the activities include Media Literacy Handbook launch, partner meetings, and information sessions, thematic plenary sessions on Media Literacy, art appreciation, podcasts, training on MIL Handbook, publish Op-eds, participates in debates, publish policy briefs, sending joint letters to key stakeholders, conduct workshops, and have gamified and trivia on media literacy.

The mission is to highlight the power of youth media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country. Kenya Media Literacy Week will call attention to media literacy education for youth by bringing together partners for events and activities around the country.

To make the dissemination process effective and easily accessible, we will use both mainstream media and digital media. The Youth Cafe’s video informational series, animations, gamification (fun and card games) and podcast series, “Perspectives” blog, community radio engagements, TV interviews, and columns written in newspapers.

Additionally, we will have a series of live webinars which will be streamed through digital platforms, animated characters, social media campaigns. Furthermore, we will use films, games, and documentaries that will be shared through online platforms. This will be achieved through making audio-visual lessons and online materials that are designed to challenge a particular mistruth/ misinformation in the electoral contexts.

Lastly, the youth-centered Media-literacy handbook will be distributed on digital platforms such as our website and also physically distributed to the target audiences. In order to be inclusive, this handbook will further be translated into Swahili and other local languages in the future.

How does this project advance The Youth Cafe’s work?

It will help advance three fundamental goals of our work:

The project will enhance diverse youth representation: In our representative democracy, the electorate should be as diverse as the country itself. We must find more ways to improve diverse youth representation in our democracy and the issues of access to information that hinder youth participation.

It will also show that media is a civic influencer: Exposure to and engagement with media helps to build one's perspectives and understanding of our roles in democracy. Efforts to teach media literacy for elections must include this explicit connection, and media coverage of youth can and should more accurately represent young people’s participation and their experiences. How can many local stakeholders support positive civic influences through a local election ecosystem that includes visible, diverse young people in media?

Lastly, the project aims to grow youth voters. Thus, making sure we start this work early enables us to Grow Voters and active community members, preparing young people for participation even before elections are due in Kenya in the year 2022.

We hope that this project will build on our award-winning media literacy projects among African round people, recently awarded the first position by the 2020 UNESCO Global awards for Media and Information Literacy.

This project is made possible by the generous support of The American People through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of The Youth Cafe, and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or The United States Government.