When the people most impacted by a challenge become part of solution-building, solutions are more likely to meet urgent needs sustainably. Youth development projects and programs benefit from young people’s involvement in all phases of the program cycle.
Young people possess the greatest understanding of their needs. They also possess the creativity and energy to see old problems in new ways. Youth participation in program design and delivery can drive innovation, increase retention of program participants, lead to longer-lasting program outcomes, and positively impact surrounding systems.
The Youth Cafe believes that Impactful youth engagement begins with the Positive Youth Development (PYD) philosophy that sees young people as assets rather than “problems to be solved.” When we recognise that young people must be the primary drivers of their own development, with adults and systems playing a supporting role, we will understand that anything done for youth without youth runs the risk of failure.
Our current strategic plan looks at today’s youth bulge as an opportunity for development and economic growth. To this effect, we Partner with Young People, Leverage Research, Learning, and Adaptation, Cultivate Sustainability and Self Reliance, and Advance Gender-responsive Youth Programming. We are the leading organization for implementing cutting-edge positive youth development programs that utilize innovative research, policy, and advocacy actions.
This is why today, The Youth Cafe is Africa’s largest convening community of professionals harnessing youth potential for social impact. These are some of our unique features: The network hosts a membership of over 930,000 people virtually in every country in Africa. Via the website, fortnight mailings, podcasts, videos, and social media, we engage over 260,000 touchpoints monthly. Therefore, we ensure sustained, inclusive and plural dialogue between young people and stakeholders.
TYC receives over 16,700 WhatsApp messages from young people weekly regarding Digital Conversations. The TYC team leads conversations across its social platforms 24/7, giving us live insights into the ideas, priorities, and perspectives of The Youth Cafe’s members and fans.
We track trends across our digital channels to deliver the most impactful, engaging content to our fans in the right format and time. Apart from this, our unique gamification methodology is vital for our research program.
Our Success Stories
TYC implemented the Africa True Story project intended to empower the future leaders of Africa and give the young men and women in Africa from Rwanda, Botswana, Uganda, Kenya, and China an opportunity to create a piece of work about their lives or the societal issues they are concerned with. The project provided a platform for young people and Chinese youth living in Africa to tell stories about their lives in Africa. It was committed to making the Chinese Internet see a thriving Africa and linking China to sustainable investment in Africa. In doing so, the information gap and bias are reduced, enabling Chinese and African content creators to obtain income growth and digital opportunities.
TYC uses audiovisual podcasts to foster community engagement in groups and how community leaders can adopt a collaborative approach to creating spaces in which youth can have fun learning new media, enjoy creative expression, take action for community needs, and develop the potential for civic engagement by serving their peers and communities.
By producing high-quality multimedia formats like vlogs, short documentaries, beneficiary testimonials, live-streamed events, and 2D animations, TYC developed videos, gifs, memes, infographics, podcasts, and vox pops. Through that, we initiated trending messages and hashtags on social media.
TYC uses interactive blogs for communication, improving youth creativity and participation in youth development projects. Our blogs are currently featured on google news, apple news, and yahoo news. In addition, the contents have been republished by leading channels like Africa.com, global citizen, Al-Jazeera, and the BBC.
Through the use of art, The Youth Café engages with the youth in art by helping them in creating it, viewing it, and critiquing it. TYC recently sponsored young people to produce a song promoting youth involvement and engagement. The organization is also working with some youths from Kibera who are working on the production of a movie. The Youth Café also organised a cultural exchange between youths in Kenya and Indonesia.
The Youth cafe has utilised the visual arts, applied arts, food, music, dance, sports, and literature to engage young people. To explore the creativity of the young people in art and sports, The Youth Cafe has equipped a multi-media studio with state-of-the-art equipment to produce podcasts, nurture talents and enable producers to record their productions.
TYC’s youth engagements are underpinned by comprehensive Safeguarding and Data Privacy Policies to prevent and mitigate risks and abuse of children, youth, and vulnerable adults. TYC invests in project risk assessments and takes measures to mitigate risks. The organization considers the harm language can do and creates inclusive glossaries for all functional languages. Additionally, we equip interpreters with a glossary to reduce the harm of offensive and violent language.
The Youth Cafe has four roles: advocacy, capacity development, grant administration, and development action. The Youth Cafe applies a rights-based approach and enables active popular participation by supporting young people. As advocates, we aim to amplify the voice of those we work for and with.
As a capacity developer, we seek to strengthen the capacity of our members and partners around the region.
As grant administrators, we have developed a robust framework to provide grants to civil society organisations within the frame of principles for aid and development effectiveness. Our methods for grant administration focus on relevance, impact, and sustainability while guaranteeing compliance with good international administration and accounting principles and anti-corruption efforts.
Finally, as development actors, we are innovative in our partnerships, program development, and communication of our contribution to a more sustainable world.
Our work has received multiple international awards for its innovative storytelling and youth engagement approach. Our youth engagement in Digital Literacy won first place in UNESCO's 2020 Global Media and Information Literacy awards. Our work on engaging youth in sustainability was chosen as one of the five finalists for 2021’s WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award worldwide.
The Youth Cafe has made significant progress in its quest to achieve its goals through several partnerships and collaborations with public and private organizations, with more than 350 projects completed over the years.
However, not all youth engagement leads to positive outcomes. Hart’s Ladder of Participation offers a useful framework for understanding that when young people are simply “invited to the table,” their presence often becomes tokenistic or decorative. Effective youth engagement requires sufficient support, opportunities, and services to ensure that young people from diverse backgrounds can participate meaningfully and equitably in decision-making processes and leadership roles.
How does TYC achieve impact?
We integrate various constantly evolving youth engagement strategies throughout our programmes and operations. Some of these key strategies include:
Youth-oriented problem identification: We work to understand communities and systems by actively listening to young people’s self-reported needs and surrounding constraints. We invite young people to participate in stakeholder mapping, surveys, and listening tours and use their input to guide our problem and solution-identification process.
Youth perspectives in program design, planning, and implementation: We collect input from target audiences using surveys, key informant interviews, and focus groups. In some programs, we establish Youth Advisory Committees to provide guidance and direction through multiple stages of the program life cycle. In preparation for Africa Youth Summit, a continental virtual summit organised by TYC, the event’s Youth Advisory Committee shared their opinions concerning the content, participant experience, diversity and inclusion, and branding.
Youth-centred learning environments: We take the needs and perspectives of young people seriously in every curriculum we create, using pedagogical approaches that centre on the learner. In our capacity to strengthen education systems and training of trainers, we highlight young people’s assets and emphasize the creation of safe spaces where youth may learn from each other while developing healthy relationships with supportive adults. In Ethiopia, members of The Youth Cafe helped develop a youth leadership camp by identifying priority content, participating in a pilot and providing feedback, and ultimately creating the name: Supporting Others and Rising (SOAR) Leadership Camp.
Youth-driven communications: We create online and in-person channels for young people to drive conversations. Youth voices are front and centre in our conferences and workshops, videos and webinars, blog posts and annual reports.
The Youth Cafe’s work has won multiple awards. Most recently, we received an award during the DIAR (Diversity Inclusion Award Recognition)Gala for Youth in Leadership and being champions of Diversity and Inclusion. We were also honoured by the United Nations through UNESCO Global Awards. We received the first position for our Digital/ Media Information Literacy projects aimed at cultivating youth skills to advance digital skills that are crucial for access to job opportunities among African youth. The Youth Cafe’s work on sustainability was a finalist at the WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award, the world’s leading sustainability award aiming to recognise and support outstanding contributions worldwide. Through the Gothenburg Sustainability Youth Award, The Youth Cafe has been rewarded for its active role in creating a more sustainable future for young people.
Similarly, our work has been featured on the BBC, Wikipedia, Global Donor Platform on Rural Development, the Guardian, Global Citizen, Capital News, Business Daily, The Nation, The Standard, YouthLead, and World Economic Forum, among other platforms.
