“Global poverty could be halved if all adults completed secondary school education, with Sub-Saharan Africa suffering from the highest out of school rates in the world.”
We are honoured to announce a partnership between The Youth Café and #LearningPlanet. Launched in January 2020, by CRI and UNESCO, #LearningPlanet is an open alliance of education stakeholders and learning communities with a mission to inspire and empower learners of all ages to contribute to shaping better futures. Since education is one of the focus themes in our Theory of Change at The Youth Café, it was only natural to forge a partnership with #LearningPlanet.
We have developed a ‘roadmap’ called our Theory of Change to help us better navigate the way towards reaching our goals. This roadmap highlights the relationships between The Youth Cafés inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. We have incorporated the views of young people, youth-led and youth-serving organizations, and experts so that our map reflects young people’s view of how change can be achieved.
Our Theory of Change is centred around eight thematic areas, these are: Culture, Arts and Sports, Peace and Security, Governance and Political Inclusion (Accountability), Governance and Political Inclusion (Remittances), Education, Skills and Technology, Business, Job Creation and Entrepreneurship, Universal Health Coverage, and Environment Preservation and Climate Change.
Our goal for Education, Skills and Technology is to create opportunities for young people to develop employability skills and competencies including numeracy and literacy, “21st century skills” like critical thinking, communication skills, digital/media literacy skills, and adaptability to take on future challenges and opportunities in society while increasing their adaptability in the era of the fourth industrial revolution and access to high-quality job opportunities.
Advancements in technology have created a plethora of opportunities for young people to explore and use to their advantage. Especially during a time such as this, the pandemic has resulted in the shifting of all our interactions online. This can be constricting to people especially those who lack the resources to access the internet. However, we can change this challenge into an opportunity, the global shift to virtual platforms has allowed for greater inter-connectedness and opportunities to learn from people all around the world. We hope to equip the youth with necessary skills to access these opportunities. This is the spirit of the collaboration between The Youth Café, an organization based in Kenya and #LearningPlanet, based in France.
Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
One of our key objectives at The Youth Café is to enhance cooperation between African and international educational institutions and key stakeholders to promote learning of 21st Century skills with a goal to equip youth with the relevant skills and competencies for future job markets and using cutting-edge and digital pedagogy.
We asked ourselves how we can leverage innovation, our international network of partners, and our own expertise to orchestrate complex partnerships that deliver results and span government, the private sector, civil society, and youth networks. To answer this, we formulated a Strategic Plan for the year 2021, which will guide The Youth Café as we work to advance youth-led approaches toward achieving sustainable development, social equity, innovative solutions, community resilience, and transformative change. Executing this strategy will require extensive partnerships and new resources. It will require us to summon our strengths and continue to learn and adapt in order to support the young people we are dedicated to serve and live up to the youth-led principles we embrace.
Through our collaboration with #LearningPlanet, we hope to facilitate exchanges between both organizations to share best practices, methodologies, and innovative pedagogy, in order to help each other thrive and positively impact society, enhance youth employability through career and skill development programs, design and maintain an online information platform for students, enable virtual exchange and capacity building of students, teachers, networks and schools, and foster network development among various stakeholders such as students, experts, institutions etc.
At TYC we strongly believe in the idea that progress is not possible without collaboration. Therefore, we hope to cultivate a meaningful partnership in order to achieve our common goal, a better future for all.
Do you want to learn more about The youth Café and the work we do?
Connect with us:
Visit our website at: https://www.theyouthcafe.com/
Read more about #LearningPlanet: https://learning-planet.org/en/about
Email us at: info@theyouthcafe.com
Call/WhatsApp us at: +254734795798