More support needed to unlock youth innovation

In September 2013, the Democratic Empowerment Programme (Demoqrati) launched its first youth empowerment grants cycle, a multi-tiered funding mechanism designed to build democratic values and boost participation and civic engagement amongst Jordanian youth and civil society organisations.

The programme is designed to give citizens, especially the youth, a voice in their communities. It promotes a bottom-up approach to change, supporting civic ventures that address communal issues through active citizenship.

Implemented by the King Abdullah Fund for Development, the Demoqrati programme carries out various interventions that include an online portal to monitor media performance, and initiatives that nurture debate and stimulate volunteerism and community service.

The Democratic Empowerment Programme has run three grant cycles so far supporting hundreds of initiatives across Jordan.

Support for projects goes beyond the provision of grants. In addition to funding, the programme provides technical support and grantees acquire and hone new skills through the various stages of project design and implementation.

However, because of the large number of applications and selected grantees, such technical support remains limited.

For three years now, many winning youth initiatives have carried out basic communal campaigns in various governorates.

Looking for strategic relevance, the programme is trying hard to better target its efforts to identify, attract and accelerate youth actors carrying out more impactful civic ventures that can solve real problems and be sustained over time. 

The reality, however, is that many youth apply for funding for a variety of closed-ended training workshops, conferences and basic campaigns with little potential for societal impact.

Lacking the necessary skills, vision and sense of self-efficacy, many young people are unable to envision effective solutions for the social problems they identify in their daily lives.

As a result, many proposals end up being static iterations of a basic project model in which, invariably, some form of training or conference is a cornerstone. 

Antecedents of civic activism usually include a sense of political efficacy and agency, self-esteem and a supporting ecosystem that includes the family, school and community.

In such a system, the school plays a particularly important role in instilling and growing an active and participative disposition in youth needed to participate civically and politically.

To support future active citizenship, schools allow discussions of public and common issues, encouraging interests and motivations, and developing a consciousness necessary to respond to public issues.

In Jordan, the situation is different. In fact, the lack of agency amongst many young people permeates all three contexts in which youth find themselves.

In school, a disempowering learning environment feeds the youth’s lack of agency and adversely affects their ability to learn.

When it comes to work, the lack of agency precludes many young people from exploring employment options that do not rely on some form of wasta, and when it comes to electoral and non-electoral engagement, the lack of the same inhibits participation.

Even when the youth see a need for change, many of them do not feel they can exert influence over situations around them. Instead, they look to government to solve their problems.

To address these challenges, programmes like Demoqrati and other local and foreign donor initiatives in the country help build a new ecosystem to support youth voices and youth-designed civic solutions.

Support cultivates agency, propels civic action and boosts much needed resilience and social cohesion in society.

That said, the overall impact of this multitude of support mechanisms, in terms of promoting sustainable growth, policy reform and solving pressing social problems is still modest.

What is lacking are more programmes that support the incubation of civic entrepreneurs and social innovators, as opposed to only commercial ventures.

For one, more impactful social initiatives can inspire more innovation, serving as success models for future social entrepreneurs.

Also, successful social ventures can clarify the still muddled societal understanding of civic responsibility and engagement.

More importantly, social ventures, when scaled, can present solutions to better the lives of the lower strata of society.

Whether it is innovation in provision of social services, social entrepreneurship or social (and political) activism, we need to ensure that the Jordanian youth possess the mindset and skills to take on societal challenges around them.

If the Demoqrati programme or others like it are able to capture a few innovative outliers at an inflection point and support them to prove their concepts and scale up their solutions, these programmes can start effecting social change.

What is really needed is a value chain focused on youth that can bring together all the various programmatic interventions and stakeholders (donors, schools, policy makers, youth organisations, CSOs, etc.) to complement each other as they help upgrade the overall capacity of youth.

This would be an ecosystem of key activities where value is added successively as youth pass along a social innovation value chain that ensures their ideas progress across various stations until they are finally realised, funded and scaled.

For now, existing programmes like Demoqrati can support social innovation by directly or indirectly pairing funding to their grantees with long-term technical support, mentorship, skills training, apprenticeships, access to support networks in addition to close monitoring and evaluation needed for potential scaling.

Considering the lure of violent extremism to youth these days, there is not a better time to start exploring these options.

The writer, a partner and co-founder of INTEGRATED, a Jordanian consulting firm specialising in monitoring and evaluation, programme design, gender and innovation, is also member of the technical committee for Demoqrati’s youth empowerment grants mechanism. She contributed this article to The Jordan Times.