The year 2020 brought with it so many uncertainties in the world. It brought with it what is now referred to as the “New Normals” and diverse changes in many facets of lives across the globe. And in the last 2 years, the world has had to adapt and for Africa, young people have been learning to live and to cope all over again. The need to survive through the uncertainty of those last 2 years has not been able to overshadow the ever present need to rise above all those challenges that’s affected our development, democracy and nation building.

The capacity building for youth organisations in Africa project was also birthed within that year. Regardless of the ensuing situations at the time – it was designed to be an assessment of youth challenges and championing an alternative agenda for youth development across Africa as will be seen through work done in 18 months focusing on 5 African countries. This project may now be considered as a front-thinking approach to ensuring better youth development, engagement and capacity building for the future- a post covid era- where young people will be able to contribute better to governance and sustainable development in Africa.

In the last 18 months, YouthHubAfrica developed an Alternative Youth Agenda– a development framework to guide youth development programing across Africa. It has forged a new level of partnership within its communities across 5 African countries with 5 partner organizations and 150 volunteers to reach 9,233 young people. This number includes 381 youth leaders across the 5 countries whose capacity has been built to participate in and contribute to leadership, governance and entrepreneurship in their respective countries.

This has indeed been a learning curve for YouthHubAfrica, who, in spite of the virtual learning fatigue that young people experienced due to the lockdown and the difficulties of working in several countries despite the covid-19 restrictions, has been able to mobilize youth voices for an Alternative Youth Agenda that will shape youth engagement, involvement and programing across Africa for few years to come.

The next level of this initiative is the continued popularization of the Alternative Youth Agenda; advocating the adoptions of its tenets; influencing other similar youth development frameworks in African countries toward accelerating youth development in Africa; and working with Young people to build a sustainable Africa through digital skills and digital media media use.

Objectives of the Project.

• To collate youth voices, ideas, opinions and suggestions, identifying areas of capacity building needs to be able to respond to advocacy and policy, social entrepreneurship and new media.
• To create a regional document “The Alternative Youth Agenda” and “Youth Engagement Curriculum” were developed and adopted to serve as a roadmap for youth organisations to respond to developmental issues in their countries.
• Young leaders from across African countries are now aware of the Youth Strategy agenda and how they can engage with it moving forward with stakeholders.