National Youth Summit 2022 | Magnifying The Visibility Of Youth Leaders.

The Youth Summit on Magnifying the Visibility of Youth Leaders is a unique in-person event designed by young people for young people convened. The summit was convened by the International Republican Institute and The Youth Café and organized with strategic partners' support. The three-day summit has called on young people from all over Kenya to discuss the needs of youth that will integrate into the Kenya Youth Manifesto 2022. 

Broadly, the youth summit seeks to enhance the capacity of youth leaders to influence the forthcoming general elections scheduled for August 2022. In pursuit of this goal, the youth summit aims to build the capacity of young Kenyan leaders on the public policy-making process, existing policy documents, human-centered design approaches, deliberative democracy, community engagement, effective networking, and advocacy in youth-led Climate Change Action and solutions and gender-responsive policy-making. 

The summit also objectifies to profile lessons from the development and actualization of the Kenya Youth Manifesto 2017, specifically successes, challenges, and areas of improvement, and identify themes relating to the challenges of Kenyan youth and potential solutions to these needs through a human-centered design for integration into the Kenya Youth Manifesto 2022.

The discussion themes in the summit are among the Public Policy Making Process, which comprises five distinct phases; problem identification, agenda-setting, policy design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. We also aim that the attendees will leave the summit with an enhanced sense of awareness of these processes and existing policies, regulations, and legislation affecting the youth demographic. 

The other theme is a human-centered approach through which we are exploring creative and participatory ways to solve problems through human-centered approaches to development. In brief, the approach we adopt will entail understanding the target audience, their needs, challenges, and assumptions. We target to discuss innovative solutions to prototype and test that will contribute to developing the "problem statements" and "recommendations" sections of the Kenya Youth Manifesto 2022. 

The summit format is designed to appeal to a multidisciplinary audience's interests and maximize the interaction of participants and networking. The summit is further to utilize an experience-based approach with practical examples of applying concepts learned. 

Among the tools being utilized to meet the summit objectives are; Plenary Sessions with presentations to motivate the scope of the discussion and a 30-minute discussion with attendees. At the end of each plenary session, key issues are drawn to feed into the group discussions. 

The other tool is Group Discussions which follow the plenary sessions to allow interaction between summit participants and facilitators of various sessions. We have a Public Policy Making Process Group Assignment and a Persona Creation Exercise in the group discussions. 

We classified participants into four distinct groups based on age (i.e., 15-18years, 19-24years, 25-29years, and 30-35years). The participants are expected to create a persona of that age category and present it to the rest in the main plenary session for additional comments and feedback. This information will be leveraged to populate various sub-sections of the Kenya Youth Manifesto 2022. 

Another tool is the Panel discussions on areas presented to panelists in their areas of expertise to expound on before the audience. We are also having a Q&A session here. 

The last notable tool is the Keynote address, where we have various keynote speakers invited to address areas that would enhance the skills of the Kenyan youth to gain influence in civic and political leadership and influence the forthcoming general elections.

The Youth Café works with young men and women around Africa as a trailblazer in advancing youth-led approaches toward achieving sustainable development, social equity, innovative solutions, community resilience, and transformative change.

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