Project
Democracy Academy for Young Adults in El Salvador
The Democracy Academy for Young Adults (DAY) is a project that contributes to the strengthening and the promotion ofe democracy through the formation and active participation of young leaders in spaces of dialogue, social control, and defense of the democratic system with civil society and key political actors. The digital platforms used are essential to deepen and expand the exercise of democratic practices in this time of technological revolution.
The adaptation strategy to the COVID-19 pandemic was key for the project success. In this regard, a strategy aimed at adapting methods to changing, external circumstances (natural, pandemic and/or geopolitical), going beyond the risks inherent to the project’s internal design, and defining the actions and measures to be to be taken should such potential changes materialize should also continue to be considered systematically in all UNDEF projects.
The adoption of a coordination strategy between the project and other relevant actors (mostly from the Academic arena) would have been key in order to optimize resources and avoid duplication, while strengthening coordination. It is therefore important that UNDEF continues to require such strategies for all its projects.
The project was conceived as a comprehensive capacity development project with an approach involving participants into the development of replication strategies and the development of common actions and strategies in traditional and non-traditional communication spaces. However, during its implementation, the project has mainly been an academic endeavour, with a rather classic approach to capacity development methodologies and systems. In this project, as designed, the components of socialisation by the students as well as the engagement with public authorities should have remained a priority, and practical, on-the-job training approaches should have been privileged as originally foreseen. If these practical aspects are not considered a priority, a more standardized approach to capacity development should be followed at the project design stage.
Project design should focus on the detailed definitions of Global Objective, Specific Objectives, Actions, Indicators (at outcome and output level), Baseline and Targets. As it stands, the project definition lacked a clear project design matrix; overall and specific objectives and outputs were missing; outcome indicators were missing (outcome indicators were in fact output indicators), and outputs were not defined. Lastly, no sources of information/means of verification were formulated.
