YouthBaton

A team consisting of Kollision, SustainableEnergy (SE) and local partners in Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Mozambique has worked together on creating the project YouthBaton - Youth Takes the Baton for a Green Future. The project engages young people from the four countries in activities and campaigns related to climate change and experiments with using social media to exchange ideas and inspire each other across the four countries.

To enable the use of social media we identified the need for designing and developing a social media strategy, and a dashboard for SE and local CBOs to monitor social media activity, and identify successes within the project. This required us to shape the campaign structure and provide tools for the young people to document their activities, in dialogue with SE.

Volunteers from different CBOs in the four African countries will cooperate across borders, raising awareness on how to avoid climate change through campaigns. The four countries will be divided in two teams that will work together and document their campaigns – both the planning, execution and results – through social media posts with specific pre-set tags.

Kollision’s social media dashboard, which is designed as a mobile platform, pulls and gathers data from across Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook, to visualize the activities within the campaigns. This allows the participants situated in the four countries to get an overview of the activities and furthermore communicate and share experiences across borders by reporting and documenting on the selected social medias. By additionally keeping a log of the social media activities through out the individual campaigns, the dashboard also serves as an evaluation tool helping when shaping future initiatives.

The project applies an innovative approach to explore new ways of planning, reporting and documenting projects using social media, and is funded by Danida’s Innovative Partnership Fund. The project will run from May 2014 to May 2016.