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Writes Wallace Mawire
The Youth Engagement for Accountability in Zimbabwe (YEAZ) Project Flexible Initiatives to Support Youth Innovations (YEAQZ)’s Explosion! Innovators Pitch Deck held on November 8, 2024, in Harare, Zimbabwe seeks to enhance youth participation in sustainable community leadership, resource governance, and social accountability.
The project has capacitated partners to use new and creative strategies to mobilise, organise and enhance youth activism and engagement. One of the objectives of the project is to strengthen youth-led innovation that enables young people to take the lead on new solutions for addressing youth challenges encountered in their communities.
The initiative also sought to capacitate youth activists in Zimbabwe to demand a more enabling civic space, and accountable and responsive governance at multiple levels.
YEAZ has convened eight issue-based hackathons led by consortium partners.
The hackathons were supported by USAID and implemented by the Youth Empowerment and Transformation Trust (YETT), the East-West Management Institute (EWMI), and Action Aid Zimbabwe as another partner organization.
According to a YETT spokesperson, hackathons are creative problem-solving events where people come together to solve problems. The hackathons focused on entrepreneurship, youth apathy, low constitutional literacy amongst people with disabilities, youth unemployment, and limited access to information and participation in local governance.
YEAZ partners’ hackathons also seek to address issues that include unemployment, limited youth voice in civic matters, limited youth financial inclusion, and limited duty bearer accountability.
They added that the issues identified were also tackled through position papers, policy briefs links, and engagements with policymakers to offer a holistic approach to addressing the challenge.
A social innovation conference was also conducted to bring together innovative young minds who participated in the eight Hackathons to showcase their ideas in front of experienced mentors and adjudicators.
The event revolved around three key thematic areas namely entrepreneurship, civic engagement, and youth participation.
A Youth Situational Analysis (YSA) or research conducted by YETT in 2019 influenced the selection of the key thematic areas. The three thematic areas broadly cover deliberations and outputs of the eight hackathons that were convened aimed at creating a platform for youth to showcase their innovations in front of experienced mentors and adjudicators, to promote youth innovativeness and creativity in dealing with local developmental challenges in entrepreneurship, civic engagement and other aspects of community development and to provide seed funding for further development of innovative ideas.
The YEAZ consortium partners that conducted hackathons will sharpen ideas from the hackathons.
The Youth Hackathon follow-up support enables consortium partners to follow up on agreements and action plans at the community level. This will include adjudication and input from experts within various areas including positive youth development and Information and Communication Technology to deliberate and recommend the most innovative prototypes for support.
YETT said that this will allow for the consortium and youth to own the process and lead the design and implementation of the winning innovations.
Youth Flexible Initiatives led by consortium members to support youth innovations will continue to allow for the development and launch of models and prototypes.
YETT said that each YEAZ consortium partner will submit one best innovative ideas to pitch their innovation online.
They added that eight ideas will be submitted and the five best will be selected through a mixed panel of consortium partners and technical experts. A team of mentors from EWMI provided guidance, advice, and assistance to winners throughout the prototype development process.
The winning ideas will be awarded a financial prize which will be in-kind support, such as financial and technical support to be paid directly to service providers in the development, rollout, or adoption of the innovation for implementation.
