The Youth Café, a leading youth-led organization advancing meaningful participation, leadership, and socio-economic empowerment across Africa, has unveiled a robust Environmental & Social Management System (ESMS) Framework. This new policy underscores the organization’s commitment to sustainability, ethical practice, and inclusive development in all its programs and partnerships.
Using Social and Behavior Change in Youth Democracy, Rights, and Governance Programming
Through years of programming and evidence generation, we have learned that focusing exclusively on improving services or systems may not lead to desired outcomes. As such, programs are increasingly focusing on working with individuals, communities, and other groups to demonstrate the impact of utilizing SBC approaches. Understanding what influences behaviors, as well as the barriers to changing them, are critical to bringing about desired changes in these behaviors
Meaningful Youth Engagement
Meaningful youth engagement is a participatory process in which young people’s ideas, expertise, experiences, and perspectives are integrated throughout programmatic, policy, and institutional decision-making structures so as to best inform outcomes. This process requires young people to be involved in all levels and stages of program, policy, campaign, and initiative development, including all stages of design, implementation, and evaluation; this is especially true of those programs that directly affect their lives.
Citizens Summit in Defense of Democracy & Freedom | Lusaka, Zambia
State actors and non-state actors alike, including civil society and the private sector, prioritize the effective participation of young people in governance and economic spaces and that young people themselves must continue to actively pursue effective non-tokenistic participation that allows their voices to be heard and integrated into policymaking.