l Editorial 7
Box 1: Ideas on taking forward youth
and governance advocacy work
• Promote youth participation in Mexico; work to
lobby the government to effectively listen to the
voices of youth
• Run a workshop for my team and partners in
Uganda on the ‘book’ [PLA 64]
• Work on a report to document successful
challenges of youth participation in Restless
Development UK and push forward the creation of
a Restless Development UK Youth Board
• Improve my current project with rural youth,
based on learning today – with a stronger
emphasis on governance
• Use and disseminate credible and concrete
examples of youth-led participatory successes
• Distribute this to our Regional Youth
Representatives in the African Commonwealth
countries
• Talk to others in my organisation about
integrating youth participation in M&E (of our
programmes but social audits of governance
programmes also)
• Encourage Plan to do more writeshops
then gave a talk on the PLA editorial
process and the involvement of young
people in producing the special issue, as
well some discussion on the key themes
from the special issue itself, and looking at
governance from a young person’s perspective – i.e. seeing like a young citizen.
The participants at the launch found
the editorial process and the writeshop
extremely interesting and relevant, especially the ways in which the authors
brought so many young voices, perspectives and knowledge to the special issue. A
Skype link-up with two of the authors in
Nairobi, Kenya, Edwine Ochieng, a
government officer, and Cynthia Ochola
Anyango, secretary of the Jipange Youth
Organisation, enabled them to share their
learning and reflections on their own
youth and governance experiences.
Towards the end, Jessica facilitated an
exercise using a two-circles diagram showing the interlocking spheres of ‘citizens’
and the State and the interfaces in
between. We had a really interesting
discussion with participants who positioned themselves and their own work
within the spheres.
Lastly, we spent a few minutes reflecting on how we could take youth and
governance advocacy forward in our own
work (see Box 1).
This is a hugely important aspect – that
participants are taking forward ideas of
their own to improve how young people
participate in decision-making and governance within their own spheres of
influence. It’s something we also learnt
from producing the last issue PLA 63: How
wide are the ripples? From local participation to international organisational
learning – that individually, we can all
make a difference and that change comes
from within, one step at a time!
New translations: PLA 62 in Chinese,
PLA 64 in French
The French translation of PLA 64 – Jeunes
citoyens : les jeunes et la gouvernance participative en Afrique – is now available online.3
Please let your colleagues in francophone
Africa know! We are in the process of
preparing a bilingual CD version. If you
know of anyone who would like a copy,
please ask them to get in touch with us:
pla.notes@iied.org.
The Chinese version of PLA 62 –
Wagging the dragon’s tail: emerging practices in participatory poverty reduction in
China – will soon be online. Again, please
let your networks know that this is available.4
3 For PLA 64 (French) see: http://pubs.iied.org/G03336.html
4 For PLA 62 (Chinese) see: http://pubs.iied.org/14605IIED.html (forthcoming).