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The Youth Café was there by invitation of ICLD and delivered an inspirational lecture regarding best practices when it comes to communication and dissemination. In attendance were five partnership municipalities: Region Vasternoorland and Mombasa, Harryda Municipality and Homa bay county, Robertsfors and Municipality and Machakos County, Strangnas and Dar-Es Salaam, Leksand and Soroti. Each partner municipality had a specific project in which they were involved, ranging from literacy challenges; child and youth involvement in children’s rights; gender equality; youth involvement in city council; and resources for addressing unemployment. The municipal partnerships were financed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and were designed to contribute to the development of efficiently functioning democratic local authorities in both the partner countries and Sweden. These municipal partnerships seek to increase civil influence by strengthening local and regional governance organizations in areas such as equity, transparency and citizen participation. The aim of this conference was to better create solutions through which each partner municipality could reach their audiences, improve their service provision and increase public participation through clear guidelines that would make the target group want to get involved with the cause. Thereafter, if their projects are proven viable, they will receive 100,000 Swedish Krona in funding from the ICLD. We have initiated the conference to highlight how the performance framework implemented from 2016 has affected the partnerships projects results… The focus during the workshop [was] on the sustainability aspect of projects – how we do share and disseminate good results, how we best communicate about our partnerships externally, what opportunities exist to take the partnership work forward and lift it further?” Emma Olosfon, ICDL Knowledge Officer.
It is the wish of ICLD that the municipalities share good practices that can inspire other municipalities with methods and practices that enhance local democracy through ICLD’s core areas. Moreover, it is important for the municipalities to be able to communicate their message and the objectives of their projects to the citizens. During a short brainstorming exercise on information dissemination, one of the groups came up with social media advertising as a method of spreading the word about youth involvement in social projects. However, the approach was unrealistic in that they expected to reach about 50,000 followers in a day. As a matter of fact, all groups except for one mentioned the use of social media; however, they lacked accurate methods of attaining their goal. This is where youth involvement is needed to fill this gap in knowledge in the use of social media marketing. With eight years of experience, The Youth Café, a youth-run organization, was thus invited to give a presentation on strategic ways in which information could be disseminated to target audiences. The Youth Café, having undertaken extensive research and refinement of their social media methodology, has devised a number of ways in which they have efficiently disseminated information to their target audience.
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