engagement

Integrating project activities with existing municipality initiatives involving youth has proven to be a successful strategy for ensuring project sustainability. In addition to creating new dialogue spaces between municipal authorities and youth, this project leveraged existing platforms, such as annual meetings with the local councilors, to include youth consultation in the municipal annual activity plans. This approach fostered stronger youth participation following the project capacity-building activities.

The inclusion of political parties in the development and planning of activities during the project design phase could have further enriched the initiative's relevance and ensured a broader and more inclusive platform for youth participation in Mozambique's democratic development processes. In this project, specific activities aimed at encouraging youth involvement in political parties resulted in eighty-nine percent of the project beneficiaries registering with political parties. However, the potential for even greater youth involvement in political activities could have been realized by involving political party representatives in the design of tailored activities to promote active participation and enhance engagement in party-related initiatives.

While working on promoting rights of the transgender community, it is important to focus equally on demand creation through activities enhancing the rights awareness of the community focused on by the project, along with strengthening institutional capacity of public sector institutions for inclusive service delivery.

Building cross-party networks of LGBTQI+ activists can ensure that key issues are retained on the agenda and more substantively engaged across the political spectrum.

Engagement with, and mapping of, prospective national institutional stakeholders in advance of a project taking place is critical to ensuring that the activities proposed align with their interests and priorities and are feasible in the timeframes proposed.

WhatsApp can be a key project management tool that delivers support to both cost-effective monitoring of implementation and the building of networks and structures. But this is most effective when combined with occasional in-person meetings or visits, to ensure personal relationships are built offline, before they are maintained, sustained, and developed online.

For training to resonate and be most impactful, they need to be delivered in a setting and format that appeals to participants. Ensuring that they are conducted in the language participants are most familiar with and in an interactive and engaging format can aid with comprehension and ultimately impact.

Given the numerous challenges of the Palestinian context, it is increasingly relevant to engage Palestinian youth in order to increase their individual resilience and help them cope with the stress they face. Youth in Gaza face double exclusion compared to their peers in the West Bank as a result of settlements and internal conflict, which makes engaging them more difficult and therefore requires additional funding, effort, and monitoring to achieve meaningful change and results.

This project has demonstrated that even in the complex and difficult context of Palestine, setting realistic objectives in terms of the number of beneficiaries and communities of intervention, and adopting a pragmatic approach that includes relevant and useful activities such as training and community services, can engage different target groups, regardless of their political affiliations and sensitivities, and generate impact at both the individual and community levels.

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.