Africa Renaissance Hub
About ARH
In 2016, the African YMCA Movement developed the Y3.0 strategy for the future of the African Movement. Under the auspices of the strategy, the AAYMCA was mandated to guide and lead the implementation of Youth Empowerment spaces dubbed Power Spaces. These are both physical and virtual spaces that provide opportunities for youth to engage, to develop, to grow and to be creative.
With technical partnership from the AAYMCA, National Movements can develop innovative spaces for entrepreneurial initiatives and leadership opportunities for young people. To facilitate the processes, the AAYMCA has developed an exciting new model for innovative implementation of Power Spaces based on contextual participatory interpretation. We have created the Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation (3Is) Workshop for Power Spaces as a strategy for innovation. The 3Is Workshop is very participatory and encourages the engagement of stakeholders, duty bearers, youth, YMCA staff and CSO partner organizations.
What we do at the ARH
THE PROCESS
The 3I
The 3Is Workshops are 5-day Human Centered Design (HCD) workshops that involve the participation of stakeholders, duty bearers, youth, YMCA staff and CSO partner organizations. Within the 3I Workshop framework, AAYMCA facilitators use Human Centered Design tools including Persona Mapping, Interviews, Focus Group Discussions, Customer Journey Maps, Stakeholder Analyses, Problem Statement Ideation and Validated learning matrices. The 3I workshop is followed by the development of prototype projects project which identify and test the most appropriate strategy for intervention for vulnerable urban based youth, including the viability, for example, of giving micro loans to vulnerable young people who otherwise could not attain loans in the mainstream banking sector.
