Participate’ creates an exchange between young people between 19 and 27 years from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Germany.
The objective of ‘Participate’ is to foster the participation of young people as ‘agents for change’ for promoting the issues of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: decent work and sustainable economic growth that all people and especially young people can benefit from.
The organisations partnering in this project are: University of the Free State (South Africa), Partnership for Development Initiative Trust (Zimbabwe), Farafina Institute (Germany – coordinator).
The aims for the project are:
To foster the participation of young people as ‘agents for change’ for promoting decent work and ensuring sustainable economic growth.
To enable sustainable connections and joint action among youth from Africa and Europe.
To strengthen the capacities of Participating Organisations, their cooperation within the consortium and their connections with other youth organisations and agents for future joint activities.
The objectives are:
To enable exchanges between youth from Africa and Europe about history, culture, economy, politics, institutions, justice, political and governmental systems, educational systems, opportunities of participation of young people, especially in regard to SDG 8.
To increase participants’ intercultural awareness, appreciation of diversity and sense of solidarity.
To connect all participants with Farafina Institute’s online platform ‘Action for Change’ to enable exchanges among the group and with other youth and jointly plan and implement projects.
To develop several concepts for follow-up projects with the participants and form working groups for their implementation.
The activities include:
Two exchange visits (21 days each):
one exchange visit to Zimbabwe (Mutare and Harare)
one exchange visit in Germany (Nuremberg)
Indicative activities during the exchange visits include (to be specified in the course of the project and with contributions by participants):
Joint sessions/workshops with the whole group to exchange about the context of participation of young people in the participating countries and opportunities for young people to contribute to fostering decent work and ensuring sustainable economic growth in their societies.
Participants make inputs (presentations/workshops) about history, culture, society, youth participation, decent work and economic growth of their countries and about their own experiences with social and political engagement.
Participating Organisations and external speakers share insights and lead discussions on issues of youth participation, decent work and sustainable economic growth.
Feedback sessions on the exchange visits. Participants discuss how to integrate their ideas in the project outputs and dissemination activities.
Visits to different institutions for gaining knowledge about social and economic structures, systems and institutions.
Participants form working groups and develop strategies for follow-up projects; they develop strategies for future action on the national and cross-national level, concrete steps are decided, and tasks are assigned.
Group visits to organisations: Small groups will visit different organisations that work towards the promotion of decent work and economic growth from a certain perspective (e.g. job training, entrepreneurship, union work, etc.) and in a certain sector (e.g. agriculture, services, industrial production, academics etc.) in order to gather practical insight into work approaches.
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2. Three preparatory meetings (1 day each) before each exchange visit and after the second exchange visit will be conducted with the participants.
The meetings will introduce participants to the project, gather their expectations and input for the outputs and for the exchange visits, determine which input each participant will give throughout the project based on their prior experience, develop a schedule for participants’ input, form working groups for the development of follow-up projects and plan logistical issues of the exchange visit.
3. Development of concepts for follow-up projects and other outputs.
Participants will develop concepts for follow-up projects as part of this project and will continue working on their projects after the termination of ‘Participate’. They will also contribute to other outputs that participants jointly decide on.