Following the successful hosting of Impact Investor Foundation’s convening in 2021, TELIAT SULE and LEHLE BALDE engaged DABESAKI MAC-IKEMENJIMA, program officer at the Ford Foundation, on the significance of the forthcoming Nigeria Youth Futures Fund, which is being financed by the Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation with possibilities of other donors contributing in the future.
Dabesaki Mac-Ikemenjima is a senior program officer based in the foundation’s office for West Africa in Lagos. He currently works at the intersection between gender and natural resources, and manages grantmaking that integrates women and girls, disability and youth lenses across these two domains. This work actively promotes the inclusion of the voices of diverse groups and perspectives, including youth and people with disabilities.
Dabesaki has had extensive experience working on youth issues from research, policy and program perspective across Africa and beyond. Prior to joining Ford, he was a policy consultant to various international non-governmental, governmental, and multilateral institutions. He was an embedded consultant at the African Union Commission for an extended period and supported the development of regional frameworks and strategies, as well as providing technical assistance to its member countries. He was also the executive director of Development Partnership International, a youth-focused organization that worked to promote youth leadership in addressing health and education challenges in Nigeria and Zambia.
Dabesaki holds a PhD in international development and MA in development studies from the University of East Anglia, and a Bachelor’s degree in Educational Psychology from the Rivers State College of Education. He was previously an external research associate at the University of East Anglia and is a visiting researcher at the University of Witwatersrand.
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Please give us the background to the youth fund, the motivation, and other information about how the fund was implemented elsewhere, especially in a sub-Saharan African country that shares similar socio-economic characteristics with Nigeria.
Let me start from what I didn’t end up saying at the 2021 IIF Convening. There is a particular notion of a dividend connected to youth, supported by research conducted over the last 15 years. The main findings of this research indicate that there is a demographic dividend related to the youth population and suggests that particular investment is needed to empower the youth with skills and other human capital for countries to take full advantage of their high youth population. One core element of these investments is their participation in development conversations in their respective countries.
The British Council, along with scholars from Harvard University, conducted a study that concluded that in the 2030s, young people rather than oil would become Nigeria’s most important resource. The question around how to reach the dividend and the resources that will be deployed have always been hanging in the air. In the last few years, there has been a push towards greater inclusion of young people and strengthening their voices in the political process with the advocacy for constitutional change that will give more space for young people interested in running for political offices. This is an important path to achieving the demographic dividend.
The second argument comes from the long history of leadership in this country, going back to the 1920s when the Lagos Youth Movement was set up. The youth movement in Nigeria has gone through several stages, from the push towards the end of colonialism, the end to military rule, and activism in an era when there was a collapse of the civic space when a lot of the key actors were driven out into exile. You now have an era of a resurgence where you know, with Occupy Nigeria in 2012, you had a movement towards greater youth engagement in making demands for political and social change.
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The ENDSARS movement with young people calling for accountable policing was almost like the climax of the period of resurgence. The way that process ended and the fall out of it meant that anybody working with young people needed to think a bit more about supporting them in a sustained manner because the protest ended, and some young activists were targeted. Access to their funds was cut off, and some of us within the space started to think about how we do two things. One is to create opportunities for young people to be more proactively engaged with the discourse around policies to not be reactive in responding to something terrible but thinking actively, engaging with the State, and making policy recommendations. Also, when young people want to be involved in active work in their communities, to facilitate their access to resources to do that kind of work.
We are looking at a 5-year fund that will support young people. When we look at the leadership development programs and strengthening that spectrum of the work, we ask, what is a realistic number to look at and of course, as people initiating the fund, how much are we putting on the table versus what we are expecting others to bring as contributions to the work? We thought that $15 million was a good enough number to provide the resources that would be useful to do the work that needs to be done. We think about the funds as an independent resource currently managed by LEAP Africa, but the idea is that it is available, and over the five years, it will be helpful to support young people. MacArthur put in funds along with us to launch the fund, but the other conversations are either ongoing or have stalled for any number of reasons. You have the political period coming – starting from 2022, and there might also be hesitation around whether there is any political implication for work that is explicitly focused on youth leadership.
The fund itself will operate in two ways: it would provide funds directly to young people doing community-level work. These works do not need to be specifically focused on any particular topic, provided that there is a strong enough argument that the work they have to do is relevant for the communities that they serve. Different working groups will be set up at state and national levels and will serve as platforms for advocacy. The plan is to have a national youth working group that will engage with the government around the vision 2050. To think about and visualize what 2050 would look like to the best of their ability, come up with clear policy recommendations for that period and, you know, engage with the National Planning Commission (NPC) to help bring their design to the table and then think about how you do that at state levels. My typical example is with housing. We know that there are millions in housing deficit across the country. There is always the question of, if you disaggregate this figure by states, how many houses per state would you need? You know, some states like Lagos will probably need many more compared to other states like Bayelsa, where you have a smaller population. So, what does it mean for young students who are just leaving the university to start their own homes? How many housing units do we need for people at state levels? How many housing units do we need for university graduates, being a particular population of young people who are entering adulthood and finding their own space? What kind of housing do we need?
I think the fund would need to figure out a way to connect those young people not included in the working group with the relevant structures so that they are not just talking to themselves or coming up with recommendations that nobody would use. The advantage of the state-level working groups is that it will model some of the things that organizations like ours have been advocating for as far as inclusion is concerned. We talk a lot about gender and disability inclusion. We also talk a lot about youth inclusion. In some sense, we don’t have enough models of how to do that well. The structures of the fund themselves would be structures of inclusion because they are structures that will create space for young people, whose voices would typically not be included in these conversations. We hope that through this process we can model how to do youth inclusion well that either state governments or different types of organisations, like humanitarian organisations, may want to adopt.
Above all, what do we hope to get out of this? I think the issue with leadership programs sometimes is that it is straightforward to pay attention to the process rather than the substantive benefits to the individuals. An example would be young people who working to advance education or economic opportunities. It is easy to focus on the outcomes of that work rather than on what improvement is happening in their own lives as individuals. In this program, we will focus more on the individuals and what they learn from that process. One of the things that I hope will come out of this is that we would have been able to support and build up a small cohort of young leaders in this country who understand the needed ethical principles, that understand the depth of the problems, that understand how to engage with the issues, understand how to come to solutions through some process, in a way that they are not just throwing recommendations at the problem that they do not fully understand and that itself has implications for the future of leadership in this country because if they end up in politics, hopefully, they would have gained skills and competencies that they need to think a bit more about all these problems before beginning to talk about what the solutions will look like.
What are the metrics you use to measure success?
There are two metrics to look at: the one that can be quantified. Here, the focus is on support for a group to maybe do a particular project in a specific community. While the project is ongoing, it could also be monitored to assess whether they conform to indicators set at the start and then evaluated at the end. The second area that we also need to look at is individual development because it is the individuals that can leave a legacy given that the program will run for some time. If we are successful, the individual participants would have fully understood or absorbed the content and imbibed the principles in their own work. So, we are impacting those individuals, while at the same time working with them to address systems-level challenges.
The fund is a five-year fund. Manpower development is a short-term period. People have started talking about 2023. Do you foresee any likelihood of anything happening that can stall the program from taking off as planned? And if it happens, what are the alternative plans?
One of the reasons we ended up with the fund’s establishment was in response to a specific moment. In the communication that we sent out, we talked about ENDSARS being the trigger for establishing the fund because we knew that there was a confluence of factors, both historical and at that moment. For a while, I have been talking about the idea of a unifying agenda. My interpretation is that it is that thing that enables several different actors to connect their various problems to a single issue. In this case, it was accountable policing, but if you look at the protests, there were all kinds of things being said. People were talking about better governance, infrastructure, freedom of speech, and what have you.
The fund is an opportunity to respond to that moment where it seems like the conversation around accountable policing has created a unifying agenda for diverse groups of young people to communicate how they feel about the improvement they would like to see in their country and their lives. In responding to the specific moment, you also don’t want to have a fund perpetuating historical flaws because you also want to figure out a way to build on the momentum and hopefully create opportunities that other people can build upon.
LEAP Africa manages the fund. For almost 20 years the organization has had its leadership development programs. Other organizations in this country have also run leadership development programs. The fund will therefore contribute to an ecosystem of opportunities that support young people to prepare them for leadership. The value proposition is that we will build on a momentum that exists. That momentum could be an enhanced political environment in which there is a more significant opportunity for young people to play leadership roles. The second thing is that this is a perfect moment to launch a fund like this. When set up, the working groups will have policy conversations. For a long time, people in the political space have been saying that there is a limit to having issue-driven politics, and political actors cannot seem to be able to get around to it. So, you have manifestoes written in isolation of what candidates say and do. If we go back to the housing example, you would expect the candidate in the state to talk about social policy that includes the possibility of social housing and outlines the ways the state and local governments can support affordable housing for indigent citizens. And to figure out even the strategies for building the houses, ways of getting some of the money or all of it back from home buyers and how much subsidy to provide. That level of conversation does not happen.
If we are successful, it would be that you have a group of young people who are bringing the issues to the table. Their understanding of the problems would hopefully drive their engagement with the wider civil society, policy makers, business, and everybody else. If that is all we achieve in this program, it would be quite a significant achievement. It means that, at least, in this generation, you have a small group of young people or leaders who are driven by what matters the most, which is the process that leads us to solve the problems that matter to all of us.
How do you ensure that your programs encompass all class buckets?
The class question is essential, but the mechanism of getting there is complicated, and I do not know that any one of us has a transparent system of figuring out that question of class. One way to do it would be to associate location with class. So, assuming that rural youth or the urban periphery would be related to a lower class, that could be a way. It is an essential but complicated question to respond to. As per the categories, one of the ways to select young people who participate in the process is to consider disability and gender. Across these domains, we would make sure that young people from each of these different categories will participate, both in the working groups which we have direct control over and by ‘we,’ I mean the governing process of the fund, not us as Ford. The other question you asked was about how we would get the people. Let me start with the governance of the process. The governance of the fund would have representations from donors; now, that is MacArthur and us. It will also have representation from the fund’s management, which is LEAP Africa. Then, it will have representation from young people and subject matter experts. The aim is to have a higher number of young people because it is their fund and to minimize the influence that the donors would have on the decision-making of the fund.
There will be a role for the donors, but they will be at the steering committee level whenever such conversations happen. It is the voices of everyone else and not so much the donors that will guide decision-making. The governance structure would be the critical decision-making platform for most of the decisions made regarding the fund. There is a national working group and state-level working groups as well. Those would be done by nominations and would be across the board. People will nominate representatives to be at those places. It will be based on who is speaking on behalf of those constituencies. I was at a meeting for young leaders with disabilities, and I told them that the youth futures fund working groups would be an excellent place to make sure that we get those voices, but that is only because we are connected to those constituencies of young individuals with disabilities. The grants will be announced as most grants are announced through calls for application. We need to make the process as inclusive as possible so that people in locations typically missed out are not excluded. The nomination process has to be merit-based. But I think that the class question is something to really think about.
What are your plans to effectively engage the government?
We are clear that the government needs to be on board for meaningful change. That is why we engage actively with the government and work with government departments to address issues relevant to those departments, but this process in itself – the fund itself- is built around the government process. I stated the point about vision 2050, and if anything, I see the fund as actually supporting the government’s process by aggregating the points of view of young people and submitting them to the government in writing. And in any case, the questions that young people are asking are the questions that government officials are or should be asking. The questions are about how do we create more jobs? How do we build more houses for the citizens? How do we make education better? How do we make access to health care more equitable? These are questions that government is or should be asking, right? But these young people are not just asking the questions; they are engaging with evidence around these topics so that by the time they have their recommendations, they would have engaged with enough bodies of evidence to be able to say, given all that we know, to solve this problem, this is what you need to do. With the work that the working groups will be doing, they would be supported by deep-dive analysis: in writings and working papers that will really help their engagements at that level so that people are not just saying you need to create a new policy that may already exist somewhere. I hope that it is understood and received that way that the intention is to be complementary. The other piece is to say that this is designed to address specific problems and that the young people in communities will hopefully be looking at issues they have seen in their communities that they can solve. We have been talking with the government departments about youth development. It is not an area where we primarily work, but we have been talking to the government departments and looking at how you support youth employment to create as many jobs as possible for young people. As you know, the government launched a N75 billion youth investment fund in July of 2020. We have been in conversations with them for almost a year now, trying to think about what kinds of contributions we could bring to help the government achieve its goals of creating jobs at the end of the government’s fund period and think together about the sustainability of the fund itself.
We work with young people on the one hand to do critical thinking, and we also work with government departments, on the other hand, to think together. We are talking with both sides of the table, hoping that we will understand the nature and depth of the problems and what type of solutions would be meaningful for them.
Are there countries in sub-Saharan Africa where similar policies or programs have been implemented?
Ford used to have a program called Next Generation Leadership and we focused on the leadership development of young people across Africa. It was very similar to what we are trying to do with this fund which is to empower young people through opportunities to engage in policy discussions and to provide them with the resources for the work that they are doing. The youth opportunity work was implemented in four countries, particularly Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria. The thinking was to elevate young people’s voices and support them in the regions where that program was implemented. One of the things that came out of that work is that some of those young people set up their institutions that have now become models to look up to in terms of youth engagement in their respective countries.
