In the series ‘Our Year in Stories’, we highlight several stories from our 2021/2022 Annual Report. We start off with a story about the Challenge Fund for Youth Employment. In 2021, together with our partners Palladium and Randstad, and with the support of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we continued to successfully address the issue of youth unemployment in Africa and the Middle East. We involve young people early on in the program so that their voices are truly heard in tackling this issue.
Youth engagement is a key element in our volunteering for development approach. We create environments and platforms that allow young people to participate in conversations concerning their livelihoods, pursue their dreams and aspirations and take action to improve their own and other’s well-being. Fridah Okomo is a Kenyan Youth Champion, helping our Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE) and Kenyan implementing partners put the aspirations of Kenyan youth at the centre of project designs. She spoke at the Youth At Heart conference for the Dutch Ministry at the RewirEd Summit in Dubai.
‘My experience as a Youth Champion has been an incredible learning journey. Together with other young people, I got to participate in a design sprint aimed at putting youth at the centre of the CFYE programme through direct engagement in the programme’s design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. The experience has been significant as it deconstructed the concept of youth engagement.
As young people, we are usually involved in youth-centred initiatives very late in the process. I really like that in CFYE, we started from the onset, designing a role cognisant of youth aspirations and needs and one that is spearheaded by the young people themselves.
When solutions are designed for young people without their involvement or based on the mere assumptions of what we want, many opportunities are being missed. So, I would say that direct involvement is key in building meaningful engagement. The latter starts with not only consulting young people but enabling them to participate in decisionmaking. I witnessed CFYE’s ambition of meaningfully engaging youth first-hand: on top of building solutions that align with young people’s needs, the programme amplifies the voice of young people at every level of the programme. For example, promoting youth representation across all CFYE countries at national, regional, and international levels, including existing Youth Advisory Boards and conferences, is an excellent step towards letting young people drive critical conversations. Being part of CFYE opened my eyes to various possibilities that I had previously overlooked. My ambition for the CFYE youth champions, and young people in general, is to be the generation that demands and implements change. Together, we change structures, deconstruct policies, and enact something new. It is the start of something different – a new dawn to meaningful youth engagement.’
The power of our collective action
We are grateful to all those individuals, institutions and companies who have worked with us in the last year. Together we have shown we can work with the most vulnerable to change our world for the better. This is the power of our collective action! Read our annual report and find out what more we have achieved in 2021/2022.