Above: Delegates from Kenya visited key U.S. cities as part of an IVLP exchange in November/December 2019. For the last 80 years, the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) has brought thousands of professionals to the United States to cultivate relationships with their American counterparts and address a wide variety of foreign…
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Above: Teams develop their campaigns at our Youth Innovation Labs, like this one in Mombasa, with guidance provided by the Young Cities team. It started with a simple invitation – a request for applications from youth interested in attending an innovation lab and solving a key local challenge. We shortlisted the brightest ideas and invited…
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Mandera County Chief Officer for Prevention and Countering Violent Extremism, Mr. Mohamed Adan Osman (left), in discussion with Mr. Saleh Maalim Alio (right) of Mandera Municipality Board member at the SCN Isiolo Inter-County Exchange Conference, 20-22 November 2019. In order to understand the many and varied challenges and realities facing P/CVE efforts across Kenya, we…
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Continuing on from our previous article on the importance of engaging and involving youth in municipal decision-making, as well as the mission of the SCN’s Young Cities programme, we are pleased to provide an update on the projects and work that youth are undertaking in Kenya, Lebanon and Senegal. We hope this can provide inspiration for our members for ideas on how cities can work with and empower youth, the range of issues that can be addressed, as well as the benefits of collaboration.
This is a last call for proposals. The SCN is seeking to fund a minimum of five local civil society or grassroots organisations between $8,000 and $10,000 USD to carry out projects which support the implementation of the County Action Plans in SCN member or engaged counties (Isiolo, Kwale, Lamu, Mombasa and Nakuru).
Above: youth from Dakar, Senegal, participate in an Innovation Lab as part of Young Cities’ programme of work ‘Young people are the future’. While this is a truism, the reality of a growing youth population for cities makes the prospect a daunting one. In some cases, youth population growth is outstripping the country’s ability to…
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Building trust between youth and local government can be a daunting task. The more local governments can create opportunities to support, partner and work with youth on the local issues that matter most to them, the better.
In part as a response to major terrorist attacks, including at the Westgate Mall and Garissa University, Kenya has committed considerable resources to P/CVE. In the 2016 National Strategy to Combat Violent Extremism, the Kenyan Government mandated counties to develop County Action Plans (CAPs) to support national CVE efforts at the local level. From 26…
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Above: the launch of the Tripoli Youth Office in Lebanon The past two months have been a busy period for the Young Cities team, delivering activities in collaboration with SCN members in Kenya, Lebanon and Senegal. Young Cities is SCN’s flagship youth engagement, capacity-building, advocacy and policy programme that supports the development of local youth-led…
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Last week, Mombasa held its Annual CVE Convention, which focused on the implementation of the county’s CVE Action Plan for 2019 and prominently featured the Strong Cities Network. Present at the event were more than 200 Mombasa CVE stakeholders across a wide spectrum of government, civil society and private sector, all invested in various pillars…
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