SANF 21 no 10 – by Raymond Ndhlovu
The youth in southern Africa have the capacity to develop social innovations that can address the region’s socio-economic challenges.
However, there is need to improve the participation of young women and men, including rural and marginalised youth, and facilitate skills development and socio-economic and political inclusion of young people in the region.
Social innovations are new social practices that aim to meet social needs in a new and original way that improves or modernises the existing solutions.
These social innovations respond to social needs through use of safe entrepreneurial practices that share common heritage to facilitate positive social development.
The UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa in partnership with the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC) has worked with youth organisations in SADC to develop two programmes supporting youth participation, development, and social innovations in southern Africa.
The joint initiative is made up of two concepts titled,
- AfriNet – Giving Voice to the SDG Generation: Engaging Young Women and Men as Partners for Development in Southern Africa, and
- Harnessing Social Innovations for Youth Development and Transformation in Southern Africa.
UNESCO and SARDC with youth networks have launched an online partnership-building campaign to appeal to potential sponsors to fund these two youth-led programmes, and to raise awareness among stakeholders on the need to support social innovations and youth engagement in southern Africa.
Calling for support and partnership on these two interventions, the Director and Representative of the UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa, Professor Hubert Gijzen, pointed out the need to team up and support the youth for a common good.
“We need to support them to speak up and scale up their innovative solutions and approaches,” he said.
“We are ready and eager to engage and team up with you. Your partnership is what we need. Your ideas, energy and innovation power is what the world needs,” Professor Gijzen said.
This initiative is in line with United Nations (UN) Agenda 2030 and the recent agreement UNESCO concluded with SADC on the support to youth development as well as AU Agenda 2063 on youth-driven development and a culture of peace.
Speaking about this project, the SARDC Executive Director, Munetsi Madakufamba emphasised the need to nurture youth social innovations to advance regional development and integration.
“These two interventions seek to address this by increasing the participation of young people in development issues through social innovation, which is not just about technology but many other innovations that responds to social needs in more effective ways than existing solutions,” he said.
The AfriNet concept seeks to increase the participation of young women and men in development issues, promote socio-economic inclusion and consolidate a culture of peace in the region.
It also notes the need to increase capacity of the youth to develop social innovations to address socio-economic challenges in their communities as well as promoting youth social entrepreneurship.
The project is activity based and is intended to deliver on the following pillars: Youth civic engagement to foster a culture of peace and social inclusion; Media and information literacy for youth; and Youth entrepreneurship and social innovation in the cultural and creative industry.
The concept on Youth Social innovations aims to strengthen and support youth social innovations for the promotion of youth development and transformation, as well as socioeconomic development of the region.
It notes that most inventions and innovations by the youth fail to gain traction due to a number of impeding factors such as the absence of institutional mechanisms with the capacity to identify and nurture youth innovations.
The project aims to facilitate development of an institutional mechanism to support, safeguard and encourage youth innovations; and promote the portrayal and sharing of a common heritage through youth social innovations.
These two initiatives observe that young people between the ages of 16 and 35 account for the majority of people in the southern Africa and Africa as a whole, hence, there is scope for the region to benefit from this demographic dividend if measures to tap into youth participation and social innovations are implemented. sardc.net
