Achievement at a glance
#NAYDSDSGs was instigated through a facebook chat on Jan 2 2016 when a group of leading African youth development activists met to discuss the way forward to implement the SDGs in rural communities. 16 months have now passed and in general progress has been made but many obstacles need to be overcome. Social media continues to be used extensively to promote and support the initiative.
Challenges faced in implementation
There are many continuing challenges drought, military conflicts and political issues continue to restrict progress in many countries like Eritrea, Somalia and South Sudan. CBOs are used to working independently and not collaboratively. It is difficult to get mixed gender teams in some countries. Translating existing community development activities into a measurable SDG is an issue. There is still no easy to understand monitoring or benchmark system to measure SDG progress in rural communities. Many African governments have still not made firm commitments to the Agenda 2030. Communication continues to be problematic in rural communities - power outages, little or poor internet, mobile phone limitations, different languages and dialects. We tried to organise a workshop in the summer and later with AU Chapter in November but financial constraints forced a postponement. Regarding the teams, lack of interest seems to be the dominant issue as most team members are often busy and work independently and do not want to work with the other team members. Most people do not understand what the role of these teams are and the fact that there is no fiscal capacity as all activities are voluntary limits how much the team can do....not able to do certain things due to other commitments which are financed and more attractive.
Next steps
The key issue is to organise a workshop to meet up and agree actions. The Cape Verde team is making a tremendous effort to host this workshop in October with the participation of all the national leaders of #NAYDSDGs. It is also collaborating with the World Forum of Local Economic Development, to be hosted by the Government of Cape Verde in October. It should be noted that the team has no Headquarters and no financial resources for its operation - members have been supporting its operations with their own resources to cover travel, communications and other initiatives which has limited the impact of. It has to be stated that it is disappointing to note that there has been no obvious global support for African rural communities, including yourselves and SDSN
Measurable outcomes
Beneficaries
Rural Communities and relevant stakeholders
Actions
There are on-going team activities in quite a few of the countries but these are all being carried out without any financial support. For instance the Niger team had a working meeting with the President of the National human rights commission. This object of the meeting was to present the team of Niger, its activities and establish a partnership between the two parties. The President of the commission welcomed the partnership with the team of Niger and assured us of his availability for the partnership. So the Secretary general of the national human rights Commission has been instructed to take into account the plan of action of the Niger team in the 2017 Commission program. The Niger team has been invited to participate in the strategic planning of the national commission of human rights (CNDH) workshop. Beside team activities there are many individual CBO activities not documented in this report. NAYD also continues to use its social media outreach to highlight SDG activities. One of these is a BLOG called \'In conversation with\' - an example of a recent topic is on \'Empowering young women, for leadership and civic participation\' More information can be found at http://sdgs.nayd.org/2017/02/empowering-young-women-for-leadership.html