LEAP Africa celebrates Youth Day of service… set to rally the agency of youth for the SDGs
LEAP Africa, one of the Nigeria’s leading non-profit organizations for youth development recently announced a new campaign to celebrate ‘International Youth Day’ on August 12.
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It is a youth ecosystem driven event involving other youth focused organizations such as Junior Achievement Nigeria (JAN), Teach for Nigeria, Wave Academies, Mind the Gap and Youth Hub Africa.
The campaign was a week-long event from August 12 - 18 in commemoration of ‘International Youth Day’ to create awareness for community service. On August 12, LEAP Africa rallied young people, corporate organizations, public and social sector organizations to become advocates and renew the spirit of active youth citizenship with emphasis on spreading the culture of service and collective responsibility. The campaign featured different projects championed by young people in various communities across Nigeria.
According to Mr. Femi Taiwo, Executive Director, LEAP Africa, “with only a decade to reach the global goals, LEAP Africa is committed to building the capacity of young people as ready talents for the actualization of the SDGs”. One of our strategic pillars as an organization, is raising talents for the sustainable development goals, and the ‘Youth Day of Service’ presents us with a unique opportunity to mobilize the efforts, energies, creativity and agency of young people across board; and to rally an ecosystem of like-minded organizations to support and advance efforts towards localising and achieving the SDGs, he said.
Youth Day of Service is personal leadership in action; a massive movement intended to empower young people, strengthen communities and trigger collective actions that would move the continent closer to achieving the SDGs with 2030 in view. A day when Organizations across sectors including employees, fellows and Alumni members come together to perform acts of service in their communities leveraging the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework.
Speaking on the activities and participation on the day, Taiwo said, young people carried out physical projects or active virtual advocacy in different locations across Nigeria as either project initiators or volunteers on existing projects listed on the campaign portal. “Young people are creative problem solvers and this campaign is an opportunity to showcase this. Imagine the amount of change we can create when thousands of young people do acts of service”, he concluded.
The campaign attracted change agents from across Africa with hundreds of participants all sharing photos and videos of their positive change projects from their respective locations via social media using the hashtag #YouthDayofService and #Youth4SDGs. The objective is to spur young people to champion social change in communities and demonstrate by doing; influence others to take on personal leadership and be the change they want to see in society. Here are some amazing photos from the project sites…
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