We joined the delegation of the Africa-Europe Foundation to the #SEforAll forum in Kigali, Rwanda, which called for clean energy transition and climate justice.
Co-chairing an event with the European Commission "Leaders of Today and Tomorrow: Cross-Continental Cooperation for SDG7:
Our Director Neringa co-chaired a discussion with Myriam Ferran, Deputy Director General for International Partnerships, European Commission. The roundtable, with young people from Africa and Europe focused on solutions to support youth-lead CSOs. Below are some of the recommendations of youth leaders:
- Youth (organisations) should influence the solutions that government and INGOs implement. Therefore, youth as stakeholders should be heard more when defining the process of funding - including project topics, direction, implementation. There is also a need for a flexibility in reporting (which can be challenging for the EU to allow, since it has a lot of own rather rigid:bureaucratic rules).
- In addition, there are challenges with access to finding for Africa-based youth NGOs. Often even medium-size youth NGOs are not able to receive EU grants.
- The EU and many other donors do not have the capacity to administer small scare grants, and only works with large institutions, organisations. As a solution, the donors could use larger youth NGOs as intermediaries, and have them coordinate and allocate small-scale grants to smaller NGOs in the country or region.