The Youth Café Partners With LEAP Africa On The Youth Day Of Service.
“Youth-led social change is not new; the tools and strategies being developed stand on the shoulders of giants from more than a century ago. However, the increasing intentionality has heightened the effectiveness of youth approaches and deepened the impact they are having throughout communities in Africa and beyond.”
Nearly all the countries in the world have committed themselves to 17 life-changing goals outlined by the UN in 2015 to improve the lives of their citizens by 2030. These Sustainable Development Goals (SDG goals) include important themes such as No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Good Health as well as Education, which not only help the development and economy of a country, but also restore peace and humanity in the world.
The decade of action is upon us which means we have less than ten years left for the implementation of the United Nation’s Agendas. But unfortunately, according to the Sustainable Development Report, African nations are way behind in the implementation of these goals. Almost 60% of Africa’s population in 2019 was under the age of 25, making Africa the world’s youngest continent. This population provides an opportunity for the continent to address Africa’s sustainable development challenges.
LEAP Africa as an organization has come up with a solution to the dire challenges that face us: Youth Day of Service (YDOS). YDOS is a week-long youth-led social impact campaign to create awareness and mobilize young people across Africa to take civic action in commemoration of the annual United Nations’ International Youth Day, held from 12th August to 18th August, 2021.
YDOS is a Pan-African movement intended to empower young people between the ages 13-35 to exercise self and transformative leadership skills in a bid to strengthen communities and trigger collective actions that would move Africa forward. The YDOS was piloted in 2020 and rallied a total of 81 youth project leads (52.6% male and 42.4% female) across Nigeria and Ethiopia, who implemented projects both virtually and physically with the support of 1,271 volunteers, and they were able to impact a total of 11,465 beneficiaries.
On that note, The Youth Café is excited to announce a partnership with LEAP Africa to implement YDoS 2021. As implementing partners, we will be harnessing our networks to mobilize the youth to make change in our community as well as offer technical and logistical support where necessary.
The campaign theme of 2021 is ‘Youthful and Useful’ as the goal is to foster the active engagement of youths for community development and actualizations of the SDGs in Africa. Our objectives are to create awareness and mobilize the youth for the involvement and betterment of Africa, build a safe ecosystem to encourage youth participation through collaboration, organize youth-led community actions, and to also foster multi-sectoral partnerships to support these youth-led initiatives and advocacy.
This is an opportunity for diverse participants- all the youngsters and youths between 13-35 who are willing to showcase their leadership skills and are able to carry out projects across African countries including youth-led and youth-focused organizations as well as development companies/partners. Our expected outcomes for 2021 are a minimum of 1000 projects, 100 youth champions/influencers, 5000 registered volunteers, over 100,000 beneficiaries’ collaborations of youth change agents, and a platform for all the youngster to lend their voices and contribute to nation building.
YDoS includes lives on Instagram and YouTube, webinars/workshops, press releases and a press conference leading up to the International Youth Day (12th August). These media rounds are targeted at creating awareness about the Youth Day of Service, mobilizing African youth to carry out change projects, and educating them on their role towards the actualization of community development. The YDOS webinar series will help in promoting narratives centered on raising talents for the SDGs through the Youth Day of Service program.
The meeting on July 16th 2021, was held on Zoom with a general theme of ‘Deeds Not Words: Leading Social Change.’ Its objectives were to encourage the youth to host successful young men and women leading change across various sectors and communities in Africa, inspire the youths and highlight a simple process for identifying, developing, and harnessing their skills and financial resources towards driving social change through stories/insights shared by the facilitators on their individual journeys.
The Executive Director of The Youth Café, Willice Onyango was one of the speakers on the panel and he spoke during the break out session themed Changing Your World Through SDG Micro-Projects. This session uncovered the crucial role of young people in localizing and actualizing the SDGs by identifying certain social ills in alignment with one or more SDGs and addressing them as micro-projects on a local, national, or international scale.
“Youth-led social change is not new; the tools and strategies being developed stand on the shoulders of giants from more than a century ago. However, the increasing intentionality has heightened the effectiveness of youth approaches and deepened the impact they are having throughout communities in Africa and beyond.” This was indeed the main idea that was explored and discussed about.
From our perspective at The Youth Café as a unique youth-led organization, since our founding in the year 2012, we strive to enrich the lives of young people by modelling and advancing youth-led and right-based approaches for fostering community resilience, achieving sustainable development, attaining an equitable society, proposing innovative solutions, driving social progress, and inspiring transformative change by utilizing innovative research, policy, and advocacy actions.
Digital spaces have allowed us to connect to people from all over the world and view things from a number of perspectives, becoming a global bridge builder in the process. The pandemic has forced humans to break from the past and reimagine the world anew. We have had the time to reflect on policies and have plenty of conversations and have identified what works and what doesn’t.
It is now time to take the next step, and this we believe can be done by harnessing our networks and coming together to design and implement programs through volunteering and internships. We have learnt over time that sustainable solutions lie within the targeted beneficiaries as end users. This is why we are thrilled to explore what we can achieve through our collaboration on the Youth Day of Service.
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