outcomes

Aiming to empower young government and civil society leaders from southern Africa to catalyze transformative change in their home institutions and communities, the project had indeed a positive impact on some participants, both professionally and personally. It comprised of four principal components: training, support to “personal reform” projects developed by the trainees, integration of the trainees into an existing network, and evaluation of the reform projects with a view to identifying good practice and replicable initiatives. Overall, however, it represented poor value for money for UNDEF taking into account the high cost (US$350,000), relatively small number of participants, lack of strategies for broader engagement and inadequate outcomes.

The project aimed to identify new youth fellows, train them in leadership and concepts of democracy and governance, and prepare them to lead development projects in their communities. The strategy to do this was through "placements" with local grassroots organizations. The 130 trained youth fellows were supported through the fellowship network, including meetings at local and state levels and by identifying 400 youth volunteers through community "reflect circles" that the fellows facilitated. Together, the fellows and volunteers led and established a large number of development projects within the communities, ranging from pig rearing to the building of early education centres. The model is ideally suited to both produce the expected outcomes and also lay the groundwork for potential future representation at national level. The project far exceeded its own expectations, reaching more than 100,000 people through project activities. However, planned training of journalists and the development of a website proved not to be possible in the political climate in Myanmar and were replaced by the production of a series of newsletters for the fellows and for broader dissemination.

The project was related to the establishment in Burundi of a National Consultation Steering Committee (NCSC) made up of government, UN and civil society representatives and tasked with addressing issues of national reconciliation and accountability for past large-scale human rights violations. The overall goal of the project was “to help the NCSC to achieve its mandate and promote transitional justice”