The youth demography is often left behind when it comes to project implementation and are really consulted even when they have the right information and key eye witness and ground knowledge. It is also a well known fact that this demography is the largest in most African countries, but regardless of their numbers, the youth are largely untapped and under utilized.
At the 8th African Population Conference held in Entebbe, Uganda from the 18th to 22nd November, this and many other issues on how to harness this largely dormant demography were center stage. UYAHF was privileged to attend one such workshop organized by Youth Researchers Academy and Hivos with the main aim being how to teach the youth how to gather information, compile it, and implement it as a fully finished and usable research paper.
This workshop was attended by various youths from different countries such as Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, to mention but a few. Various research papers were showcased with real life evidence to accompany them but perhaps the most compelling was the one submitted and presented by the deaf community from Zimbabwe on how this often ignored or heavily under-utilized community can be of help in changing so many issues in society. they demonstrated how they reached out to the deaf people in their community and from around the world, how they got health workers to learn the basic sign language, and in the end, their research was aimed at finding out how many health workers are skilled to handle patients with hearing impairment. this research was then used to implement sign language skilling in Zimbabwe.
the day long workshop had so many research methods and papers discussed and by the end of it, the participants walked away with a new skill on effective research methods and how to compile this information into a usable paper to aid in implementation of projects.