Initial stakeholder engagement session for Voices Unite – September 2018
Planning a project like Voices Unite is no easy task. Nearly three years of long nights and early mornings, hundreds of meetings, endless strategizing (and re-strategizing) and truck-loads of coffee led us to this point where Voices Unite is finally a reality! Along this journey, we’ve been working with so many amazing people and in September 2018, we co-hosted a stakeholder engagement session at Henley Business School with some of them.
The session aimed to do the following:
- Initiate discussion between key stakeholders in the Voices Unite partnership network regarding project plans, objectives and potential.
- Engage on key challenges facing South Africa’s students to help guide the focus of the Voices Unite research.
- Inform a theory of change capable of advancing the objectives of Voices Unite.
- Begin to explore how Voices Unite can facilitate new and innovative ways to empower South Africa’s youth.
The session was a great opportunity for the Voices Unite team to meet our partners in person…
And debate in great detail the various challenges that youth are facing across the African continent; and how Voices Unite can contribute to efforts to address these challenges.
When asked to provide general thoughts and opinions regarding the potential of Voices Unite, delegates responded that there is ample potential for breaking entrenched barriers and facilitating much-needed integration between key stakeholders vis-à-vis the youth.
What excited delegates most is the vast potential of Voices Unite to enable transparent, informed, youth-centred policy-making, capable of resolving longstanding issues at play in South Africa. However, in addition to its local relevance, delegates indicated that the general thrust of Voices Unite is likewise relevant for Africa as a whole.
In light of the above, some delegates highlighted a number of critical pitfalls associated with failed youth development initiatives in the past, such as corruption, shallowness, lack of implementation etc. In this regard, it was generally agreed that Voices Unite should steer clear of such pitfalls while uniting stakeholders around a common vision founded upon credible, representative data.
Not only should we learn from previous failures, but so too must we amplify existing successes to catalyse maximum transformative potential. In the words of one delegate, Voices Unite is both “exciting” and “perfectly timed”.
Sharing is caring!
Help us spread the word about Voices Unite:
