How Does The Youth Café Embody Purposeful, Ethical, And Value-Based Leadership In Africa?

The Youth Café shares this interview with Africa Practice conducted by Fulufhelo Ramathikhithi, on behalf of Stories Africa, a project conceived and administered by Africa Practice and supported by the Leadership & Values Initiative (LEVI), the World Economic Forum Africa Regional Strategy Group. 

The Youth Cafés Multidisciplinary Youth Group's report, published on 13th November 2013, makes recommendations that became the guiding principles for implementation. Eleven priority areas of action are identified for The Youth Café, playing critical roles in strengthening meaningful inclusion for youth. The Youth Café, therefore, brings a multidisciplinary and multi-perspective approach through Youth Population Trends and Sustainable Development; Youth and Comprehensive Sexuality Education; Youth and ICT; Fostering Dialogue and Mutual Understanding; Youth and Smart Investment, Youth Participation in Decision Making; Youth and Hunger; Culture and Youth Development; Youth and Armed Conflict, and Youth with Disabilities.

The basis for the prioritization of youth development is rooted in Our Strategic Plan, which looks at today's youth bulge as an opportunity for development and economic growth. The prioritization of youth development has made The Youth Café the leading organization in realizing sizable, lasting, and positive changes in the lives of young people in Africa. Youthful audacity to dream big and execute those dreams is essential in tackling Africa's daunting challenges today. Fostered by grassroots knowledge, The Youth Café commits to reducing youth deprivation and socio-economic empowerment resulting in transformative change. 

Today, we are actively working on several cross-cutting issues, partnering with hundreds of organizations responsible for delivering programs, bringing other partners on board, innovating & providing solutions for implementation challenges. It has enabled us to bridge the gap between generations by bringing government leaders and policy influencers to implement youth policies and share knowledge and ideas. It has assisted others in achieving their own goals for their youth aligned with existing national, regional, and international frameworks, the SDGs.

The Youth Cafés mission and vision are to enrich the lives of young people by modeling and advancing youth-led and rights-based approaches for fostering young people's civic efficacy, community resilience, sustainable development, and equitable society as well as proposing innovative solutions, driving social progress, and inspiring transformative change by utilizing innovative research, policy, and advocacy actions.

At The Youth Café, we have developed a Theory of Change to depict and reflect young people's views of how change occurs. This document's principles call upon organizations to recognize and invest inclusively and specifically in the opportunities of youth, recognizing the unique challenges they face and ensuring that no young person is left behind. These youth-led principles constitute the voices of young people gathered during The Youth Cafés virtual consultations.

The Youth Café carries out catalytic, action-driven, and progressive change for the sake of helping young citizens. These Pillars of The Youth Café provide an essential organizing structure for developing and implementing its various programs and initiatives, which play a critical role in reducing youth deprivation and socio-economic empowerment of young people in the continent.

Young people make up the bulk of Africa's total population, with an estimated 75% of the continent's population below 35, filling our continent with incredible energy and potential. Yet throughout Africa, young people face unprecedented challenges and life-threatening risks, often disproportionately carried by girls and young women. This calls for a paradigm shift towards the recognition and support of the youth to harness their potential by building capacity for quality education, skills improvement, good governance, affordable healthcare, wellbeing and livelihoods, accountability, decent employment opportunities, leadership skills, empowerment, and social entrepreneurship, fueling the energy and passion within The Youth Café to make a difference.

The Youth Café has addressed how our interventions and programs lead to lasting changes through our expertise, an international network of partners, and youth-led approaches toward achieving sustainable development, social equity, innovative solutions, community resilience, and transformative change with the type of evidence that indicates progress, and the most effective strategies to help a majority of youth unlock their potential.

Concerning the SDGs, we help address universal health coverage, education through skills and technology, gender equality by incorporating gender equality in our project activities, business, job creation, and entrepreneurship, especially for the youth, environmental preservation and climate change, peace and security and local and international advocacy for good governance.

Our progress towards our mission has not been without obstacles, for instance, funding. The Youth Café, a not-for-profit organization, mainly relies on stakeholder contributions to run its projects. Secondly, lack of motivation and ownership from youth derails uptake and urgency of initiatives and threatens the sustainability of the projects and, ultimately, our mission.

Leadership is pivotal for progress, and great leaders have attributes that distinguish them from the rest. Successful leaders are the power and intellect behind their organizations. They are not only the visionaries charged with steering their brand around pitfalls but also know when to seize opportunities demonstrating leadership qualities in their personal and professional lives, inspiring others to take action, and setting a course for future success. Other commendable attributes of a leader are self-managing means prioritizing your goals and being responsible for accomplishing those objectives. An effective leader must regulate his time, attention, and emotions while remaining aware of his strengths, weaknesses, and potential sources of bias.

Influential leaders know when to talk and when to listen. They are effective communicators and can clearly and succinctly explain everything from organizational goals to specific tasks to their employees. If people don't understand or aren't aware of your expectations, they fall short, so the more specific you can be, the better.

Successful leaders know how to use power and authority appropriately without overwhelming or overpowering others. They are accountable and responsible. Influential leaders hold themselves accountable and take responsibility for their own mistakes and they expect others to do the same. They can work within established procedures and be productive and efficient in their decisions.

Successful leaders encourage strategic thinking, innovation, and action. When making strategic business decisions, they must consider internal organizational factors, such as product roadmaps and staffing needs, and external factors, including government regulations and technology advancement. A leader looks forward and thinks about where the organization is going.

When a leader is said to be resilient,  the first thing that pops into one's mind is a fighter. At Stanford University, they believe change is constant, and so does The Youth Café. There's so much change in the workplace today, and when change occurs, great leaders must be able to respond accordingly and continue to produce results. Great leaders assume these changes and develop alternative solutions.

Leadership is about being visionary, having a vision that inspires those who work for and around you to participate actively in critical goals, objectives, and the overall mission. Great leaders can inspire, empower, motivate and encourage others to unlock their full potential and become more significant. Leaders instill hope for success and a belief in them in their people. Positive leaders empower people to accomplish their goals.

Non-successful leaders lack vision and focus for the future. The job of a leader is to push forward and always concentrate on how they can make tomorrow more efficient and productive than today; however, most of today's leaders are neither focused on the future nor demonstrate a clear plan for how to improve continuously.

Concerning the subject of inclusivity, as The Youth Café, we believe that an intervention created for the youth should be designed with them. 'The youth are the leaders of tomorrow' is a common saying which is often true to achieve our Theory of Change, creating a pathway for action, sustainability, results, learning, and adaptation.

Today's leaders fail to include the younger generation in national panels, decision-making, and ideologies with the propaganda that they are young. Yet, the youth deserve this opportunity to shape and change negative narratives across all areas such as economy, politics, education, health, environment, and technology in this fast-moving world. These youth-led approaches will help achieve sustainable development, social equity, innovative solutions, community resilience, and transformative change.

The best leaders operate with transparency and honesty and take accountability when things go wrong. Some leaders, however, not only withhold information but are unable or unwilling to shoulder the responsibility for their actions and instead deflect blame to others and take credit for themselves.

A leader who lacks integrity will make decisions based on making them look good rather than beneficial to others. They look at their actions as a performance to be rated for approval rather than a step toward doing the right thing for the community. Solidarity. 'I am because you are.'

At The Youth Café, our youth must understand pan-Africanism and how it majorly impacts leadership. We are Africans, and Africa is ours, so some leaders fail to embrace this and are corrupted by the international community, yet we should know what is best for us. They should strive to make a better Africa themselves, with the help of other Africans and the youth, to 'make Africa great again.'

A good source of inspiration and motivation is Nelson Mandela. The Youth Café is a Pan Africanist organization that advocates for African empowerment by Africans themselves and formulating African solutions since we know us best. So who better to emulate than Nelson Mandela who still inspires people worldwide, from all walks of life, with his visionary tale that makes people align themselves with his cause for unity and indiscrimination for ourselves and generations to come. 

A leader must continue to grow and develop diversely. The best path to becoming a good leader is always to keep learning. The more you experience, the more you know. That means that even the most difficult challenges present an opportunity to engage in that experience, learn the lessons it holds and apply your new knowledge to what comes next. Change is constant and inevitable, and leaders must quickly respond to changing trends and innovations. They must be flexible and adapt to change for them to succeed.

Being a leader means you are part of a team, and as a leader, you should be able to motivate and inspire those you work with to collaborate as best they can. The Youth Café began as a not-for-profit organization a decade ago. It is an understatement to express just how important networking is. This is not to say that The Youth Café had no plans down the line for collaboration with other individuals and organizations of whom we share similar thoughts and targets. This says that harnessing collaboration has been something we, The Youth Café, reap its benefits from. This has progressively led to the expansion of The Youth Café regarding rights of partnerships and who bring their expertise and critical changes for implementation.

The Youth Cafés purpose is to support the senior leadership team in securing the sustainability and growth of The Youth Café by providing strategic guidance, scrutiny, and challenge in line with legal and regulatory requirements and acting as ambassadors. The board comprises 12 non-executive directors plus the Executive Director. Through human talent, The Youth Café includes a reservoir of talented human resources, including staff members, contractors, volunteers, and interns who help share robust ideologies of our vision and mission. This helps in the founding and successful implementation of new projects.

The Youth Cafés recruitment is widespread for its competitive nature. We look for three things: intelligence, initiative or enthusiasm, and integrity when hiring. A trustworthy or honest person is someone you can rely on to deliver high-quality work while also being a genuine team player. Besides the three central cores, we also look for people who portray the following values; long-term potential, ability to produce results, passion, putting skills to action, fitting the work environment, team player, and ambition.

A dangerous leader is a loner, ignorant to advise, with no support team or a team of qualified advisors, and a selfish leader at that too. Having a group as a leader creates a culture of trust and purpose, which is good so that the leader inspires others to work towards achieving unified visions and goals. Any person is subject to wrongdoing, and a team helps guide a leader on their demerits. With an effective team at hand, the leader can trust their ideas for effective leadership to come to fruition.

The Youth Café is proud of what has been committed to date and gradually. The Youth Café has collaborated with over 120 organizational partners, completed over 50 projects, given 10 years of work serving the youth, and reached over 52 countries.

Since its inception, The Youth Café has impacted over 2 million young people globally in 52 countries across all continents, 22 countries in Africa. To date, The Youth Café has a digital reach in some 52 countries and has reached over 2.2 million young men and women with its projects and mobilized more than $10 million in support of youth empowerment in Africa through the help of partners. It also reaches over 1.2 million young people online monthly and has more than 147,000 member subscribers. 

Our Strategic Plan has outlined a clear roadmap of tackling the many issues facing youth through partnering with young people, leveraging research, learning, and adaptation; cultivating sustainability and self-resilience; and advancing gender-responsive programming. Our core belief at The Youth Café is that young people can transform the planet as actors to achieve sustainable development.

The Youth Café is most proud of its youth-led expertise that ensures that youth-led programs are opportunities created by youth or youth-centric organizations where youth lead the planning, decision making, facilitation, reflection, and evaluation on issues that matter to them and their communities. The Youth Café management insight is customized to fit the needs of every project, its public-private partnerships that are representations of the support network that The Youth Café has in its advocacy work, its innovation and adaptability that involve our personnel who ensure that projects and programs are at the forefront of what they do and that the processes adopted are relevant, its networks and coalitions built through hundreds of volunteers, interns, and other organizations inside and outside of Africa.

We are glad and honored that The Youth Café is part of impactful projects that resonate with one of our eight multidisciplinary and multi-perspective governance approaches and political inclusion.

The book describes African Youth Leadership' and lays out plans of how the young African generation can understand their vision, mission, status, and action. These are terms The Youth Café associates with a lot. This book will help the young generation know and understand how to lead their lives in our contemporary world and discover that the author, born in Juba, is a learned child of Africa who has studied regionally and internationally. Dr. Henry Jembi's book offers a curious approach to youth and leadership in Africa, which is excellent to understand what The Youth Café constitutes.

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.

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