Go Youth! Global Open Call on Youth Voices | Calling On Youth-Led Ideas And Innovations!

The Youth Café has been honored by nomination to the Go Youth! Open Call which aims at engaging youth (15 to 30 years old) around the world to celebrate their social innovations in health and support them in measuring success. This is in line with The Youth Cafés theory of change which is geared towards creating business incubation programs to support young people in actualizing their great business ideas. Social innovations in health are defined as inclusive solutions to address the health care delivery gap that meet the needs of end users through a multi-stakeholder, community-engaged process.

The Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health (SESH) team, as part of the Social Innovation in Health Initiative (SIHI), are interested in novel ideas by youth innovators around the world to address health issues. These include youth-led social innovations in health that target youth, or even the wider communities that youth are embedded in. 

Exceptional ideas will be recognized by the UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) and will receive seed funding for pilot implementation at selected sites. In addition, selected finalists will receive mentorship and training from experts to enhance research strategies that will support the development of their innovations. This will include help with monitoring and evaluation, financing, and communications.

Finalists will be expected to work with SESH and the SIHI network, in collaboration with TDR, to further develop, pilot and evaluate their innovations following the results of the open call. 

This call builds on the success of national level youth social innovation crowdsourcing calls in Malaysia and the Philippines organized in 2021 and the steering committee is delighted to announce this new open call with a global focus. Evidence from crowdsourcing open calls suggests that youth are capable of developing high-quality creative health solutions in diverse settings.

This particular open call will identify youth-led social innovation in health initiatives around the world. It has a strong focus on building capacity for research among selected finalists and winners. Therefore, submission themes or focuses may include, but are not limited to Innovations to address specific health problems (e.g., COVID-19, chronic illnesses); Innovations to address impacts of epidemics/pandemics (e.g., mental health outcomes as a result of COVID-19, HIV); Innovations to address the increasing incidence or spread of health issues, illnesses or infectious diseases; Innovations to engage community members (especially youth) to participate in health-enhancing activities; Innovative campaigns or messaging (e.g., health campaigns, songs, edutainment) to enhance health-related behaviors or perceptions; and Innovative and practical interventions that aim to address a health issue.

The final deadline for contributions is tentatively set for June 30, 2022. SESH (Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health) Global and SIHI with support from TDR are the main organizers of the open call. Guidelines for contributions are described below. This will be followed by a period of Judging from July to August 2022 and the finalist will be notified in August. The piloting of the Finalist projects will commence in September 2022.
All youth 15 to 30 years old are eligible to submit to this open call. Youth below the age of 18 must also submit parental consent to participate in this open call (you will find a link to a separate parental consent form below). Submissions in all six languages of the WHO will be accepted (Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, English, Russian).

All contributions should focus on social innovations in health that are led by, and/or focus on youth. You can submit your contribution through online submission which consists of one A4 page (prefer Times New Roman 12, single-spaced) that describes your innovation or idea. These can be submitted as a single Word or text processing file via our online submission form as an attachment. Links to images, audio files, and video files can be embedded as hyperlinks in the text. Note: Only linked audio-visual material, and not additional text files, will be evaluated.

Participants can also submit through a chat-based( WhatsApp or WeChat)  method. Images, audio files or video clips accompanying your text submissions can be forwarded as well. Furthermore, submissions may easily be forward directly via WhatsApp to [WhatsApp number] or WeChat to [WeChat profile ID]. Note: These submissions should be no more than 500 words.

For enhanced accessibility to participate in this open call, the organizers also accept audio-only or video-only submissions that are no longer than 3 minutes in length. For this form of submission, participants would be expected to describe their innovation or solution within this 3 minutes time frame. They may submit this either via the online submission form or forward this through a chat-based submission platform, as described above

Submissions will be judged on a 1-10 scale according to the following five criteria: A clear and concise description of your innovation or solution, The relevance of your idea to health issues and the affected communities, The Novelty of your idea or solution, Feasibility and Scalability of the innovation or solution with a keen focus on whether the proposed idea can be easily piloted and whether there are means to assess the effectiveness of the solution, Promotion of Equity and Fairness.
 

After screening for eligibility, all the eligible entries will be assessed by independent judges. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three independent individuals and final decisions will be made by the steering committee.

The open call has global prizes. Selected finalists will receive seed funding (quantum subject to the needs of each project) to pilot their innovations in their communities, as well as research mentorship to help monitor and evaluate their projects, write research manuscripts, and disseminate their findings to a wider audience. Finalists will also be given the opportunity to have their projects recognized at international conferences and ceremonies.

The Youth Cafés Executive Director is part of the Steering Committee alongside Dr Darlan ALVARADO (Honduras), Dr Uche Veronica AMAZIGO (Nigeria), Kalisito BIAUKULA (Fiji), Dr Beatrice HALPAAP (Switzerland), Dr Meredith LABARDA (Philippines), Mr Senthil Kumar MURUGESAN (India), Mr Thu Kyaw MYAT (Singapore), Mr Siddharth NAIR (India), Ms Noluyolo NGOMANI (South Africa), Dr Robert SCHERPBIER (Switzerland), Ms Yusha TAO (China), Dr Rayner TAN (China/Singapore), Dr Joseph D Tucker (United Kingdom/United States).

The Youth Café, in its essence, works to increase training/mentorship opportunities for young people to leverage and create self-employment and job opportunities through business incubation programs and start-up capitals to support youth with great business ideas but lack financial means. Another area our work focuses on is Universal Health Coverage where we are working towards providing key education opportunities that young people need, such as access to knowledge and information on quality, affordable, and youth-friendly Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) services, to help young people stay healthy and empowered while embracing gender equality norms and demanding rights.

For enquiries contact our contest coordinator, Yusha Tao, at goyouth@seshglobal.org

The Youth Café works with young men and women around Africa as a trailblazer in advancing youth-led approaches toward achieving sustainable development, social equity, innovative solutions, community resilience, and transformative change.

Contact us for any comments or suggestions.