2016-2017

JIACTIVATE Youth Movement 2016-2017

JIACTIVATE is a movement, made up of organizations that have come together with a range of experience and expertise, in order to raise the voice of Kenyan Youth.

Programmatic area: Governance, Democracy and Civic Engagement

Overview

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01 Summary

JIACTIVATE is a movement, made up of organizations that have come together with a range of experience and expertise, in order to raise the voice of Kenyan Youth. Jiactivate came into being in April 2017 as a campaign to identify, amplify reinforce key youth priorities in the run up to 2017 Kenyan General Elections.
The Coalition is made up of organisation that have come together with a range of experience and expertise in order to raise the voice of Kenyan Youth. The founding partners include; well told Story, Organization for Africa Youth, Kenya Red Cross Society, Centre for Study of Adolescence, Brand2D, with the support of Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, with OAY as founding Chair. It is a platform that brings together the young people with the aim of encouraging inclusive participation in the country’s public dialogue.
What is the inspiration behind JI-ACTIVATE
Following a survey that was carried out by Geo-Poll, to identify the top issues affecting Kenyan youth , findings noted that 68% of youth needed an easier way to take action on important issues.In light of this, JIACTIVATE was born, to create a platform for dialogue that unites them under one voice with a defined set of goals.

02 Strategy

Kenya’s youth make up 80% of the population, but with the August 2017 General Election
approaching, they were being left out of political and policy conversations. Despite the huge potential support to be gained from young people, decision makers and the media often wrongly assume that they aren’t interested in participating in political debates

03 Key Actions

We conducted polls to identify key issues for young people, leading to the co-creation of JIACTIVATE with eight youth-led partner organizations. The campaign featured in-person events, influencer support and digital activity, all aimed to engage youth in political discussions. We organized 50+ activities across 38 counties, combining influencers, social media and SMS activity. We also created a campaign website to encourage youth to express themselves and share inputs
for a Youth Declaration.

04 Impacts

Engaged youth in 33 of the 47 counties across Kenya
Jiactivate song gained over 164,000 views in a few days of upload.
Sensitized 137,000+ youth nationwide and launched a youth declaration
The JIACTIVATE campaign generated over 130,000 individual inputs from young people all around Kenya. At our final event, we had ~1k young people attend with all political candidates, resulting in the Minister of Youth endorsing our Youth Declaration. Since then, JIACTIVATE has built youth group capacity and enhanced understanding of government processes, establishing three JIACTIVATE issue-based networks of youth groups. These groups help coordinate county- and national-level engagement and advocacy.