Resources on: Youth Leadership and Policy
Documents and articles
A Youth Leadership Program for Africa
This chapter introduces a youth volunteer program for information and communication technologies (ICTs) for communities in Africa. The program, known as the Youth Leadership Program for Information and Communication Technologies and Community Development in Africa (ALPID), derives its impetus from the realization that information gaps and lack of access to existing informatics will further marginalize Africa as we enter the 21st century.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellowship to Start in April 2006
With the selection of 20 young and dynamic Africans as the first Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellows, the African Leadership Institute is set to launch is flagship programme in April 2006. The prestige Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellowship is a multi-faceted leadership learning experience aimed at the cream of the continent’s future leaders. This is the activity that will establish the Institute’s core network of future transformational leaders, and stimulate its intellectual foundation.
Making Commitments Matter: A toolkit for young people to evaluate national youth policy
The role of young people themselves is crucial in a meaningful evaluation of what has been achieved in the past ten years. This Toolkit is meant for youth organizations and organizations working with youth. It can be used as a tool to: Assess your country’s progress in reaching the WPAY goals; Prioritize your organization’s work, based on your findings; Initiate actions at the national level.
Pan-African Youth Leadership Summit
Providing a Global Platform for Africa’s Next Generation of Leaders in Achieving the Millennium Development Goals
Strategic Framework for Africa
USAID’s Strategic Framework for Africa is built on the new thinking about the role of foreign assistance that has developed since the millennium began. It reflects USAID’s multiple goals in development, relief and recovery and advancing U.S. national security. The Strategic Framework for Africa introduces two strategic reforms to increase the effectiveness of bilateral foreign aid. The first is to reward low-income countries that show good commitment and performance by giving them priority in the budget. The second is to recognize that some countries need help to overcome instability and weak governance before they are able to grow and prosper.
Where is Africa going wrong?
I once believed that capital was another word for money, the accumulated wealth of a country or its people. Surely, I thought, wealth is determined by the money or property in one's possession. Then I saw a Deutsche Bank advertisement in the Wall Street Journal that proclaimed: "Ideas are capital. The rest is just money."
Youth, Poverty and Blood: The Lethal Legacy of West Africa’s Regional Warriors (Human Rights Watch)
Since the late 1980’s, the armed conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire have reverberated across each country’s porous borders. Gliding back and forth across these borders is a migrant population of young fighters – regional warriors – who view war as mainly an economic opportunity. Their military ‘careers’ most often began when they were abducted and forcibly recruited by rebels in Liberia or Sierra Leone, usually as children.
Links
Africa Leadership Forum
The Africa Leadership Forum (ALF) is Africa’s premier civil society and non-for profit organization. It grew out of the need to assist in improving the capacity and competency of African leaders to confront development challenges.
Africa Leadership Initiative
There is a crisis of leadership in Africa. The result is ontinued poverty for millions of men, women and children. The causes of this crisis are numerous. But high among them is the fact that many African countries lack a broadly shared vision of the future that effectively melds the demands of globalization with local values.
African Youth Parliament
The African Youth Parliament (AYP) is a continental network of young leaders, peace builders and social activists from 50 African countries working in promoting and advocating for youthful solutions to Africa's developmental challenges. Launched at the historic AYP2003 convened in Nairobi, Kenya, AYP is an initiative of the African Action Partners to the International Youth Parliament in 2000 whose vision was peaceful, equitable and sustainable Africa.
African youth seek greater role in decision making
African youth leaders told a United Nations expert group meeting on urban youth employment in Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, that young people ought to have a stronger say in decisions affecting their employment prospects.
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
The American Friends Service Committee carries out service, development, social justice, and peace programs throughout the world. Founded by Quakers in 1917 to provide conscientious objectors with an opportunity to aid civilian war victims, AFSC's work attracts the support and partnership of people of many races, religions, and cultures.
Book Review - African Youth on the Information Highway: Participation and Leadership in Community Development
Since the 1970s, most African countries have been experiencing serious socioeconomic problems. These include the general underdevelopment of rural areas with its attendant economic gap between urban and rural centres; high poverty levels, (both urban and rural); high population growth rates that inevitably exert excessive pressure on the education and health systems; inadequate education and health services, intolerably high illiteracy rates, and high incidence of disease. Other problems include youth unemployment attributable to, among other factors, declining employment opportunities for young people and, more recently, the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Center for the International Study of Youth and Political Violence
The Center for the International Study of Youth and Political Violence (the Center) was established in 2005 with the aim of becoming an authoritative source and training agent for the potential joint role of scholarship, programming, practice, and policy in serving the needs of adolescents involved in political violence around the world.
Children's Rights Project
The Children's Rights Project (CRP) of the Community Law Centre (CLC) is one of a number of projects at the Centre which focus on the needs and status of particularly vulnerable groups such as women, children, people with disabilities and people living in extreme poverty. Ms Bridgitte Mabandla established the CRP during the period in which the CLC was playing an active part in the multi-party negotiations that led to the interim Constitution. In this capacity, staff members and associated practitioners in the field were able to influence the content of Section 30 of the interim Constitution (children's rights), which subsequently became the more comprehensive Section 28, according children substantive civil, political, and economic rights.
Connecting Africa’s Youth Leaders
More than 200 youth leaders from across the African continent attended the event, as did participants from previous regional UN Youth Leadership Summits in the Asia and Pacific, Latin America, and Caribbean regions. The regional summit series will lead to a Global Youth Leadership Summit at United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York in August 2006.
Global Voices: The world is talking. Are you listening?
Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.
International Youth Leadership Africa.(January 21-26, 2007)
Would you like your voice to be heard on the important issues facing Africa? Then come and join over 150 like minded international students from all over the world in Cape town for a week long forum on African politics, intitutions and structures
Leadership, Effectiveness, Accountability and Professionalism (Leap Africa)
LEAP provides leadership training programmes and executive coaching services for entrepreneurs who manage small and medium-sized enterprises and for youth. LEAP also invests in continuous research on leadership development in Africa. LEAP’s approach to cultivating leadership skills is unique..
Nokia and Plan give a voice to Africa's youth
Nokia and international children's organisation, Plan, have joined forces to use modern communications technologies in Africa to raise children's awareness of their rights and opportunities. Nokia has provided an initial donation of 1 million Euros for 2006. The first stage of this new joint effort will see Nokia focus on supporting Plan's existing media and communications technology projects for Africa's children and youth.
Strengthening African Leadership
Africa has long been saddled with poor, even malevolent, leadership: predatory kleptocrats, military-installed autocrats, economic illiterates, and puffed-up posturers. By far the most egregious examples come from Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zimbabwe -- countries that have been run into the ground despite their abundant natural resources.
The African Leadership Institute
The African Leadership Institute (AfLI), a not-for-profit network, was established in 2003, following two years of planning, with some seed funding by Novartis International AG. The primary focus of AfLI is to build the capacity and capability for visionary and strategic leadership across Africa, especially among the promising leaders of the future.
Ten Steps to National Youth Policy Formulation
The African Leadership Institute
The African Leadership Institute (AfLI), a not-for-profit network, was established in 2003, following two years of planning, with some seed funding by Novartis International AG. The primary focus of AfLI is to build the capacity and capability for visionary and strategic leadership across Africa, especially among the promising leaders of the future.
The Global Fund for Children
The Global Fund for Children’s mission is to advance the dignity of children and youth around the world. GFC pursues its mission by making small grants to innovative community-based organizations working with some of the world’s most vulnerable children and youth, complemented by a dynamic media program that, through books, documentary photography, and film, highlights the issues affecting children and celebrates the global society in which we all live.
United Nations Global Youth Leadership Summit, Oct. 29 -31, 2006
The workshop was intended to peer review the analysis under this ESW, and to share results across different countries. Invited academics and Bank experts made presentations based on a series of analytical background papers commissioned under the ESW. Economists and HD specialists from several SSA countries also participated in the discussion to draw the link to the Bank's operations in these countries.
Youth Media Advocates-Africa
Youth Media Advocates-Africa is a youth-led organization, which focuses on leadership development and media capacity-building concerned with the development of youth-led strategies for media accountability, openness and justice.
