Youth Initiative for Advocacy Growth and Advancement (YIAGA) has mobilised youths across the country for a workshop on Campaign, Advocacy and Movement Building tagged #CAMB2017. The workshop, which lasted from Thursday, 23 – Saturday, 25, November 2017, had in attendance 34 participants in total, with 30 coming from Nigeria and four representatives from movement bodies from Togo, Senegal, Ghana and Gambia respectively.

The workshop with support from Ford Foundation is aimed at improving the capacity of state based groups coordinating movements at the state level. The participants at the workshop were introduced to the fundamentals of community organising, theory of change, building alliance and coalitions, strategic communications and storytelling, scenario building and campaigns.

Facilitating the opening session on Organizing as Leadership Practice: People, Power and Change, YIAGA Executive Director: Samson Itodo posited: “Organizing is a form of leadership that enables a constituency to turn its resources into the power it needs to achieve its goals through recruitment, training and development of leadership”.

The workshop had in attendance, Programme Manager, Cynthia Mbamalu, who spoke on Mobilising Shared Values and importance of public narrative as a leadership practice, saying: “Public narrative connects the core elements of leadership practice which are; story, strategy and action”.

Thus experiences of movement building from Gambia, Senegal and Ghana were shared by representatives from the respective countries. For instance, Malal Almany Talal of the famous Yen a Marre organisation in Senegal, shared the experience of youth socio- political movement in the country and opined that, ‘Africa should find new ways of practicing democracy identical to the continent’s problems”. Esther Attipoe from Ghana also shared experience on the movement called “Youth Awareness, Creating Justice”, where the group leveraged on the Children and juvenile Acts in Ghana to build a youth movement.

Participants at the three-day training are expected to do a step-down training and hosting Town hall meetings on Youth affirmative action across different states in Nigeria and some parts of West Africa. Effectively putting into practice what has been learnt during the course of the workshop, the town hall meeting is aimed at stimulating debates on Youth Inclusion and need for Young People to be involved in policy making.

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