The Youth Café And The Royal Danish Embassy Discussions On The Strategic Framework For Youth In Kenya

The Youth Café recently met officials of the Royal Danish Embassy to discuss possible partnership areas as reflected in the Embassy's new strategic framework for the year 2021 to 2025. The meeting was attended by Embassy representatives including Makena Kirima- Programme Manager who is part of the docket of Access to Justice, Rule of Law and Peace, Security and Stability; Joseph Kimani Njuguna, a Programme Manager in the Democratic Governance department; Laura Balle Svenden, serving as an intern: as well as Richard Wambua and Jossie Nyamai who are part of the Embassy’s  Advisory Youth Sounding Board in charge of Climate Action, Environment and Public Budgeting respectively. On the other hand, The Youth Café was represented by Willice Onyango, Maureen Amuhinda, Fredrick Wambua and Tabitha Wangechi.

The Strategic Framework Denmark-Kenya Partnership 2021-2025 aims to support civic education and capacity development of civil society to increase civic participation and engagement in key governance processes in line with Kenya’s constitutional imperative of public participation. Long-term rights-based engagement with civil society in Kenya gives Denmark a good foundation for applying a strong Human Rights-Based Approach and a specific focus on non-discrimination and meaningful participation of women and youth. 

Moreover, the strategic framework commits to support countering violent extremism with a particular focus on creating alternative measures to supplement hard approaches by security forces focused on countering attacks, as the hard approaches involve a risk of further fostering radicalization and violent extremism. This is interesting since The Youth Café has just contributed a case study from its work on a new volume “Securitizing Youth: The Role of Young People in International Peace and Security.

Our contribution focused on digital media as the next frontier for fighting violent extremism. Published by Rutgers University Press and edited by the University of Georgetown's Marisa O. Ensor, the book gives various insights into youth and gender-related involvement in peace and security issues that the world faces in the modern era. The book also presents empirical findings on the challenges and opportunities faced by young men and women in their efforts to build more inclusive and environmentally secure societies. Since the gradual build-up of social, political, security and environmental issues in the early 2000s, the book highlights the growing number of youth’s yearning to become changemakers in society

The growing threat of domestic violent extremism presents a serious risk not only for Kenya as a country but for the region. It is critical to prioritize women’s security issues and provide opportunities for youth at particular risk. Marginalized youth are at risk of being recruited by violent extremist groups or gangs. Therefore,  in line with SDG 16, Denmark supports efforts to increase the resilience of communities against violent extremism through community engagement and opportunities for vulnerable youth.

The Strategic Framework Denmark-Kenya Partnership 2021-2025 additionally looks to promote green, sustainable inclusive economic growth and decent jobs with an emphasis on youth as well as market opportunities for Danish companies and investors with relevant solutions. Tackling Kenya’s principal development challenge of limited decent jobs and income opportunities in an environmentally sustainable manner, with emphasis on Kenya’s youth, will be critical to poverty reduction, reducing inequalities and enhancing social development and stability.

Furthermore, the strategic framework looks at youth unemployment and underemployment as a major development challenge around the world and particularly in Kenya where many young people struggle to find meaningful employment. Working to promote a green economy as well as economic resilience, The Youth Café is working on a  collaboration with Keilot. The project is intended to ensure that women and children in off-grid areas get access to Green Energy Solutions. This is through creating more accessibility channels of affordable renewable energy and green solutions to schools, communities and homes through Keilot’s technologies. 

Additionally, the project will ensure that all WASH objectives in the regions of implementation are met through access to Keilot Kenya’s water purification machines. The end goal is to ensure communities, women and schools in these regions adopt clean cooking solutions to avoid diseases caused by smoke inhalation through biogas solutions. In addition to that, working with Engie Energy Access to improve the lives & lifestyles of the youth through reliable solar energy for small businesses and opportunities for skills training in the solar  industry.

One of the ways we are doing this is through the Executives Solar Kinyozi package that is ideal for small businesses in rural and peri-urban areas needing a reliable, sustainable source of power. Backed by a powerful Lead Carbon battery, this kit is a perfect fit for off-grid barber shops allowing for seamless powering of haircutters while clients enjoy music, TV and phone charging. 1x 50Ah Lead carbon battery 1x 80W solar panel 3x Light sets (2W) 1x Mobi-charger 1x DC Speaker 3x Haircutters. Additional Features Can power; 24" /32" TV, Upto 6 Hair-Cutters, up to 2 Mobi-chargers and up to 10 Light sets.

It is welcome that Denmark is highly invested in issues concerning climate change and environmental conservation initiatives. Climate action is willing to apply the full spectrum of relevant instruments and partnerships to promote the creation of much-needed income opportunities and decent jobs, in particular for the poor and the youth, through green and responsible private sector-driven development. There are also efforts towards upskilling youth and women through mentorship in business management and innovation, provision of technical expertise and training to equip the youth with appropriate competencies to meet the skills requirements of the job market in Kenya and enable them to enter the job market as skilled labor through decent and sustainable jobs, relevant apprenticeship with various partners will also be encouraged.

The Youth Café is a nonprofit youth organization founded in Kenya in 2012 and incorporated in 2014 with a strategy that looks at today's youth bulge in Africa as an opportunity for development and economic growth. Working across eight program areas critical to Africa’s youth; we model, inspire, inform, and advance youth-led approaches towards achieving sustainable development, environmental stewardship, social equity, democratic governance, community resilience and economic viability. We are guided by our Theory of Change to utilize innovative research, media, policy, advocacy, and cross-cultural and intergenerational partnerships.

Our work is guided by the following principles: 1)Building a more relevant, sustainable, and effective enabling environment for education and work systems for young people, that recognize their rights and will. 2)Involving young people at all levels in decision-making processes that will affect their lives. 3)Partnering with young people to build a better, more resilient world for all generations. 4)Framing youth programs on a gender-responsive Rights-Based Approach (RBA), implying that young people are considered as ‘rights-holders’. To date, our projects have impacted over 2 million young people across Africa. We are active in 72 countries globally, 22 being in Africa. We have 624,000 individuals and +2,400 organizational members. Our monthly digital reach is at over 1.2 million and newsletter subscribers of over 147k.

In order to enhance equity in public resource distribution, The Youth Café works on Participatory Budgeting for youth. The project helps the Kenyan county governments crowdsource resource allocation and enhance positive change through youth involvement to improve their capacity to deliver cost-effective, qualitative public services. Participatory Budgeting is both a democratic policy-making process and a more efficient budgetary and oversight mechanism. This project links democracy, fiscal/budget management, and new technologies through online group decision-making software. It enables young people to comment, rank, and vote on local government projects based on weighted units, as distributed by expenditures, revenue, and surpluses/deficits. The project’s benefits are reflected in increased delivery of greater budgetary investments to priorities of the youth demographic, increased efficiency in service delivery, and promotion of accountability in crucial sectors such as health, education, and the environment.

Due to its work, The Youth Café was recently recognized by the US Mission in Kenya and nominated among the only 70 youth leaders chosen globally to participate in the Summit for Democracy where we highlighted our work that strengthens democracy and supports democratic ambitions. During the summit, we committed to having a bold suite of new programming to strengthen our democracy work and expose, track, and disrupt transnational corruption and mitigate its impact on democratic governance and development progress by working at the local, national, regional, and global levels. We were delighted to hear the declaration of Denmark PM Mette Frederiksen on Democracy and Technology. 

With a declaration to renew the commitment to a responsible democratic and safe development. The Youth Café has over the years undertaken projects and activities to further digital/media information literacy among the youth in Africa. In the recent past, The Youth Café implemented a media project aimed at cultivating youth power to advance media independence. We have trained and mentored a diverse mix of 1243 aspiring young leaders to produce 2378 powerful independent media content published on our "Perspectives" blog which is now on Google News and Apple News listing, thereby helping to moderate contentious discourses about issues affecting the young people in some 22 African countries. This project led to winning FIRST place in UNESCO GLOBAL AWARDS. The award cements our goal to become a world leader in Media Information Literacy (MIL) and recognizes our extensive work on digital/media information literacy in the continent.

Furthermore, The Youth Café seeks to equip young people with critical 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. These skills are critical in the electoral context in a bid to reduce political incitement, political strife, and tarnished political images and hate speech. These skills are essential in restoring and consolidating democracy in Kenya. 

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 Digital Media Literacy Handbook, we hope to address digital threats to democracy in Kenya. In 2021, we’re zooming in on the relationship between media and election participation among young people, showing its importance, and exploring the principles and role of media and information literacy in meaningful youth civic engagement. As a result, through this partnership, we undertook collaborative inquiry with a wide range of youth-led organizational partners, utilized peer-to-peer networks, catalyzed conversations and encouraged the inclusion of diverse youth voices in discussions through conducting baseline research, persona events, focus group discussions and key informant interviews about digital misinformation in the 2022 Kenyan elections.

As knowledge and thought leader, The Youth Café in partnership with  Siasa Place, Purpose and Article 19 and other key stakeholders commissioned a baseline survey with a view to identifying the demographic and socio–economic position of young people in Kenya, relative to their engagement in human rights accountability, politics and governance. Findings from the research indicate that inadequate awareness by the youth on matters central to their participation in governance has greatly inhibited their public participation. Inadequate skills necessary to participate in public decision making has also greatly contributed to the non-participation of the youth in decision making. 

In a bid to co-create and co-design with young people solutions to enhance their participation in the democratic processes, and being a leading convener, The Youth Café, GovJunction and The Commonwealth recently organized an event Youth Leadership and Political Participation that brought together government representatives; Mukhtar Abdi Ogle, EBS, OGW Secretary, Strategic Initiatives: Cabinet Affairs Executive Office Of The Presidency; Deborah Bubi, Chairperson, Youth Advisory Board, Ministry of Innovation, ICT and Youth; Michael Ashura a Director at National Youth Council; Angel Mbuthia a Director at National Youth Council and Viridiana Wasike who is the Partnership and Resource Mobilization Officer at the National Youth Council. We also invited representatives from NGOs such as VSO International, Siasa Place, Run for Office, Policy254, Footprints for change and Youth Alive. 

The aim was to secure concrete, ambitious, and transformative commitments for issues such as youth participation in governance. Overarching recommendations from the baseline survey and the event include having 1)a youth manifesto that harmonizes the voice of young people and helps in convening political leaders;2) Involving youth not only in registration processes but also promote the visibility of those who are vying for political seats and involving them as election observers; 3)Conducting mock elections in institutions as a way of instilling civic responsibility and democratic rights to young people.

In the year 2017, The Youth Café preceded the efforts to author the first Youth Manifesto. Building on national constitutions, the Regional Economic Communities, National Youth Policies, Youth Charters, The United Nations World Program on Youth, voices of thousands of youth, Organizing Committee of the Coalition for Youth Manifesto of over 62 youth organizations eg, Siasa Place, Afrika Nasaha, Global Youth Voices, The Youth Congress, International Youth Council and networks, unveiled a foundational document to frame the youth development agenda. 

Through a series of consultations with youth groups across the country, alongside expert-led and youth-moderated Twitter chat sessions and short mobile-based messages, the project secretariat canvassed the views of the youth for the Manifesto. The audiences for the consultations represented the full diversities of youth. The objective of The Youth Café with this is to uphold the values of a democratic state in order to provide a platform worthy of forming part of the central political agenda. Hence, leading up to the 2022 general elections, The Youth Café and partners are collaboratively writing Regional/County Youth Manifestos that will eventually feed into a National Kenya Youth Manifesto 2022 (KYM 2022) to outline the views of the nation's youth and demand to be given equal chance and supported to actively participate in the forthcoming general elections. 

The Kenya Youth Manifesto 2022 (KYM 2022) will focus on youth participation in the democratic process and seek to engage young people in issues that affect them through increasing their informed participation in the upcoming 2022 elections in Kenya. The KYM 2022 will also seek to effectively include young people in democracy by providing a platform to organize, generate ideas and voice their opinions without the interference of power differences. It will seek to increase the participation of marginalized groups such as Youth with Disability, Youth Living in Streets and Vagrant Youth, Youth with health concerns, Female Youth and the Boy Child, Unemployed and Underemployed Youth, Youth not in education, employment and training, Youth in emergency situations, Youth in learning institutions, Incarcerated Youth, Youth in conflict situations, Youth living in informal settlements, and Youth in emergency situations.

Under our Universal Health Coverage reform strategy, we increase access to quality, affordable, responsive, and youth-friendly health and Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) services that help young people stay healthy, empowered, embracing gender equality norms, and demanding rights. We hope to provide key education opportunities such as access to knowledge, information, and health care young people need including: correct perception of the risks of contracting HIV, increased knowledge on sexual behavior, the need to resist forced sex from partner(s) including having multiple intergenerational sexual partners, and drug use during sexual intercourse that compounds vulnerability of young people to HIV. In line with this objective, The Youth Café plans to promote empowerment through community-based programming that addresses the consequences of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and irresponsible sexual behavior among the youth.

In partnership with RESPEKT, we also plan to implement an anti-stigma campaign to strengthen sexual and reproductive health rights for adolescent girls, teenage mothers and young women. The campaign will mainly be focused on addressing unmet needs for family planning, reproductive, maternal, and adolescent health services. The project will largely work with the vulnerable and marginalized adolescent girls, teenage girls who dropped out of school and are experiencing shame, trauma and stigmatization in the rural and urban informal settings. The collaboration will aim to design a school-based program to mentor adolescent girls in sexual and reproductive health and rights with a targeted focus on preventing and responding to gender-based violence. The program goals include identifying, educating and providing sexual reproductive health information to teenage girls/mothers and young women in rural schools and informal urban settlements. Furthermore, this will be supported by training and supporting local females to act as mentors for these adolescent girls and young women.

During the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, we sought to increase attention to young people’s wellbeing and mental health by providing ongoing psychosocial support through formal interventions and programs. We conducted 6 months of Scoping an intervention in youth mental health support in collaboration with the University of Sussex (UK) through Sussex Writes, to formulate a contextually-appropriate psychosocial intervention model, aiming to improve youth mental health, promote social inclusion and strengthen post-pandemic resilience in Kenya.

The project was built directly into the successful youth engagement platform, led by the established partnership between The Youth Café and the University of Sussex. Furthermore, through this project, a blueprint for online mental health support for young people in Official Development Assistance (ODA) nations, developed in partnership with a leading youth-centered NGO and co-created with youth participants, to prepare for future delivery of a pilot study, will be produced. Lockdown Live produced clear indicators about the potential for novel intervention methods to address the youths mental health in low-resourced contexts, drawing on life writing, social media and peer support, compatible with increasing uptake of digital technologies. To further this, we are seeking to form a partnership with Shamiri Institute to further the mental health interventions agenda.

In line with the three strategic objectives of Denmark on Governance and Accountability, In The Youth Cafés strategic plan, we work to Increase advocacy for political stability and effective governance to ensure there is a transparent, democratic, and accountable environment. This is by offering an enabling environment for active participation and meaningful engagement of young people and encouraging them to exercise their civic rights and responsibilities in society. Recently, in The Youth Café in partnership with the Young African Leaders Initiative, the US Embassy held a workshop and invited over 30 young women and men leaders. 

The event focused on “Youth Contributions to Good Governance and the Fight against Corruption in a Digital World.” Young people across the world are increasingly connected, using the internet and digital tools to build their communities, interact with other similar-minded people as well as advocate, express resistance, organize events and raise funds for causes they care about, claiming space and agency in their societies and adopting new forms of participation to make their voices heard and accounted for in relevant policies. At the same time, young women and young men find themselves inadequately represented within formal political structures, and demonstrate low rates of political involvement and political party participation, electoral activity or engagement in traditional civil society organizations. During the deliberations, it emerged that young people want to be actively engaged in governance and democratic processes but the existing environment is not conducive for youth participation and engagement.

In order to create a conducive environment where young people can meaningfully participate in democratic processes, The Youth Café is a steering committee member of IEBC Youth Coordinating Committee on Elections. The mandate of the YCC is to conduct voter education, encourage registration of young people as voters and promote youth participation through vying as candidates and acting as election observers. Supported by The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), members of the IEBC YCC drawn from the Youth Serving Consortium recently participated in a workshop where we co-created and co-designed a voter education toolkit. In order to validate the toolkit, we have been leading validation meetings with young people from various counties in Kenya. 

So far, validation workshops have been conducted with The Youth Cafés members and networks in Nairobi, Nakuru, Kisumu, and Machakos Counties. In the week beginning 14th December, workshops will be conducted in Mombasa, Nyeri, Kakamega, Meru and Uasin Gishu counties. During the workshops, we also actively conduct digital activism and engage young people on social media platforms. On Twitter, our activation hashtag #VijanaHatupangwingwi was the trending topic and had an engagement rate of over 18k tweets, retweets and replies. One of the action points during the workshop was a resolution to instead take voter education to where the young people are, and so recently The Youth Café, Kenya National Youth Council (NYC), Vybez radio and IEBC organized a football match at KCA University. During the event, ongoing registration and voter education were conducted. By the end of the day, we managed to register over 640 new voters!

Therefore, The Youth Café is looking to partner with the Danish Embassy strategically for youth empowerment since the Danish strategic framework is perfectly aligned with The Youth Cafés strategic goals and thematic areas. This will set the motion for collaboration on the issues we are both invested in that concern the youth in Kenya. Firstly, this can be achieved by supporting youth civic engagement and governance programs formulated by The Youth Café and other partners, for example, empowering and strengthening the capacities of young people to take part in the democratic processes through voter’s education, youth dialogues, training youth as election observers and collaboratively write the Kenya Youth Manifesto 2022.

This will greatly contribute to increased civic participation in key governance processes and in holding the government accountable. The collaboration may also support youth-specific actions and the programs on Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights including advocacy around access to services particularly to vulnerable and marginalized communities such as the LGBTQI. Having a convergence on matters of Climate Action and Environmental conservation, we will develop strategies and initiatives that support climate-resilient, sustainable economic activities. As the next steps, we will be working closely with the Royal Danish Embassy Advisory Youth Sounding Board, we will jointly identify opportunities and co-create initiatives for youth engagement based on the strategic priorities in the 2021-2025 framework.

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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