Engaging civil society and youth in public policy dialogue in North Africa

There was an imbalance in funding between Morocco and Tunisia, and project management was not sufficiently collegial. More than 75% of the project funding was devoted to activities in Morocco, leaving only about 25% for Tunisia. A more balanced approach to funding between the two countries would have been desirable, particularly in view of the needs in Tunisia in the post “Arab Spring” context.

While the project’s training methodology was excellent, the project design did not include a sufficiently detailed analysis of the political environment surrounding participation in policy debates. This resulted in a failure to build on-going contacts to close the gap between young people and political leaders involved in policy making.

The project’s third outcome, the establishment of a regional advocacy network, was not achieved. The young participants were more engaged with designing and implementing specific projects at local level. This left them with little time or resources to engage in participatory policy development and broader advocacy. This reveals that some aspects of the training’s design – notably on advocacy campaigning and on cross-border networking – were not addressed in sufficient detail.

The project had an indirect impact through encouraging participants to engage in their own local development projects, for example, youth participants worked on awareness-raising on drugs; campaigns to encourage girls to complete secondary education; vocational training for young unemployed people and research on the exploitation of underage domestic employees.

The key impact of was changes in attitude among the participating youth. These changes can be ascribed to the Project Citizen methodology employed by the project which used a hands-on training approach, in which participants worked in small groups to develop change strategies addressing specific, real-life concerns.