The Youth Cafe Wins UNESCO Global Award!
Paris, France: 4th November 2020
The Youth Café is proud to announce that our digital/media information literacy projects with African youth has won 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.
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 Cafe 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.
The project has further organized webinars and podcasts training to help them improve their working practices in digital security and media law and to understand their rights in challenges to freedom of expression. The Youth Cafe’s podcast is syndicated on Apple Podcast, Anchor, and on Google.
This year's edition is quite special given the unprecedented situation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the disinfodemic. Considering the increase demand for MIL and related actors the selection process was difficult. The Awards Committee selected 6 winners instead, recognizing the need to reward as many MIL related initiatives as possible.
The winners are as follows:
First Place
Michelle Ciulla Lipkin is the Executive Director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. As Executive Director, Michelle has helped NAMLE grow to be the preeminent media literacy education association in the U.S. She launched the first-ever Media Literacy Week in the U.S.
Willice Onyango, Executive Director at The Youth Cafe
Second Place
Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies at Stanford University. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden's Umeå University.
Silvia Bacher is a journalist specialized in the intersections of culture and education. She was awarded first prize by the University of Buenos Aires for education reporting. She has a Master in Communication and Culture (Universidad de Buenos Aires). Currently, she hosts shows on National Radio and Radio Splendid. Silvia is an expert in the field of education, communication, and youth culture in the digital environment.
Third Place
Carlos Lima, Coordinator at the Nucleus of Educommunication (Municipal Secretary of Education of São Paulo) for 15 years. Radialist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab fellow, winner of the Creative Learning Challenge Brazil and of Mariazinha Fusari Educommunication Prize (ECA-USP). Holds a specialist title by The School of Communication and Arts of University of São Paulo (ECA-USP) in Educommunication. Creator of Imprensa Jovem (Youth Press)
Syed Ommer is an award-winning social entrepreneur chasing a vision of 'putting a book in every hand’. He is the founder of Daastan – a technology company that has enabled 7000+ global authors to publish more than 250 books in 25 genres and two languages. He has represented Pakistan in Vietnam, Thailand, and China as an official delegate for multiple social entrepreneurship programs organized by UNDP where he has won multiple awards for Pakistan.
“This year’s edition is quite special given the unprecedented situation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the disinfodemic. Considering the increasing demand for Media Information Literacy (MIL) and related actors the selection process was difficult…I personally warmly welcome your MIL initiatives and projects, and your commitment to a better literate world through MIL.
”
To increase the reach of its media literacy work, The Youth Cafe has engaged its organizational membership consisting of over 900 youth-led and youth-serving organizations as well as affiliated organizations like the UN Major Group on Children and Youth, the United Nations General Assembly mandated, official, formal and self-organized space for children and youth, to contribute to and engage in intergovernmental and allied policy processes.
Further, we have shared our work with the United Nations Inter-Agency Network on Youth Development working groups. Additionally, we have had outreach with the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN-Habitat, and Office of SG's Envoy on Youth.
Consequently, The Youth Cafe is increasingly becoming a leader in youth, media, and information literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa. To this end, The Youth Cafe was selected as one of the organizations to be featured by a UNESCO commissioned research led by the Center for Media and Information Literacy in Kenya that mapped lead organizations dealing with MIL interventions in Africa. The organization is also a member of the Global Alliance on Partnerships for Media and Information Literacy.
In the area of media and information literacy, the organization has concentrated on two of its focus areas in the promotion of the same, i.e., Education and Skills and Governance and Political Inclusion. An illustrative active of our recent activities include:
In March 2020, The Youth Cafe hosted an international Media Literacy Forum that sought to impart and empower individuals with the ability to become critical consumers and creators of media. This Forum hosted 250 key leaders in the media and information literacy and had panelists such as Nelson J Kwaje, the founder of the WEB4 All Ltd. an ICT Company that provides innovative ICT solutions with the aim of bridging the literacy gap in Africa, Steve Burger, currently the Vice President of Radio and Digital of WNIN, Tri-state Public Media, Inc. in the United States and Rachel Okwar who is currently the Learning and Communications Officer at Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). Link to event: https://www.theyouthcafe.com/updates/how-the-media-literacy-forum-went-down-the-youth-cafe
In addition, in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Youth Cafe has hosted high-level webinars on COVID-19, Youth and Information Literacy in Africa that hosted one of the leading thinkers on MIL in the world- Sherri Hope Culver, the Director of the Center for Media and Information Literacy and the Vice-Chair of the UNESCO Global Alliance on Partnerships for Media and Information Literacy. The report was recently published under the title “Finding Youth-Led Solutions to COVID-19: Lockdown Live” It can be accessed through this link: https://www.theyouthcafe.com/updates/new-report-finding-youth-led-solutions-to-covid-19-lockdown-live
The organization also advocates for the incorporation of media and education literacy into the mainstream education system in Kenya, especially during the rolling out of the new education system. Further, the organization champions the war against disinformation by creating channels for informing the youths on facts concerning different issues through seminars, workshops, and other educational and skill-sharing fora.
“In five years, The Youth Café aims to equip over 5 million young men and women in Africa with core media literacy skills and become a reference point in media literacy for African youth. Through a strong institutional approach and a community of practice centered on mobilizing key actors to entrench democracy. To date, The Youth Cafe’s youth and media literacy work has attracted over $500,000 from Google and Ford Foundation.
”
Under this strand of work, The Youth Cafe seeks to equip young people with key media literacy skills: critical thinking, fact-checking, online safety, social media verification, and quality assessment of online information and their sources. These skills are important in restoring and consolidating democracy in states where digital tools and social media networks have been used to spread distorted narratives to shape public opinions.
Conceived in a digital age where social media empowers propaganda, this project seeks to enhance young people's online civic citizenship in the face of targeted disinformation by building their analytical competencies to distinguish between facts from falsehoods. The aim is to build a culture of fact-checked youth-digital citizenship. Modeled around training, advocacy, and mentorship, we expect the participants of Media and Information Literacy for African Youth to be digitally literate citizens with the requisite capacity to evaluate the credibility of information shared on social platforms.
“Bolstered by this Award, The Youth Café will cement media literacy as an integral part of its organizational strategy through Civic Engagement, which falls under its Governance and Political Inclusion focus area. The Youth Cafe has extensively advocated for the rights of the youth, e.g. through the publication of The Youth Manifesto that emphasizes the need to advance youth participation in government and decision-making through encouraging all elected members of parliament and ministries to maintain information on their accessibility to youth on the internet. In addition, in recognition of the fact that the youth consider the internet as their primary source of information, The Youth Cafe ensures that, in its publications and projects targeting the youth, it provides accurate and up-to-date information.”
In conclusion, the organization recognizes that any engagement in media, first and foremost, requires that the users are media literate. To this end, The Youth Cafe, through its focus area on education and skills, educates and imparts media and information literacy skills among the youth in Kenya and Africa.
The youth make up the majority of media creators and consumers in Africa and globally, hence, The Youth Cafe by educating them on their rights to access and use information both offline and online and further imparting other media and information literacy skills to this population, has gone a long way in promoting an informed and skilled media user base in the continent.
About the Award
The Media and Information Literacy Alliance Awards recognizes information/library, media and technology specialists, educators, artists, activists, researchers, policymakers, NGOs, associations, and other groups integrating MIL in an innovative way in their work and related activities. Specifically, the awards recognize excellence and leadership in five sectors: Education, Research, Policy, Advocacy, Media, and communication/information sectors.
The MIL Alliance Awards are presented every year at the Global MIL Week feature conference. For 2020, the MIL Alliance Awards are led by the MIL Alliance and the Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue (MILID) University Network with the support of UNESCO and the Republic of Korea.
Karen Koech, Regional Manager for Media Literacy. The Youth Cafe
For media inquiries or interviews with the author, please contact us.