LEAP Africa, one of the Nigeria’s leading non-profit organizations for youth development has announced a new campaign to celebrate ‘International Youth Day’ on August 12.
The Youth Day of Service is an annual youth-led social impact campaign with the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDG) in focus to drive youth and citizen participation.
It is a youth ecosystem driven event involving other youth focused organizations such as Junior Achievement Nigeria (JAN), , Teach for Nigeria, Wave Academies , Mind the Gap and Youth Hub Africa.
The campaign is a week-long event from August 12 to 18 in commemoration of ‘International Youth Day’ to create awareness for community service. On August 12, LEAP Africa will be encouraging young people, corporate organizations, public and social sector organizations to become advocates and renew the spirit of active youth citizenship with emphasis on spreading the culture of service and collective responsibility.
The campaign will feature different projects championed by young people in various communities across Nigeria.
According to Mr. Femi Taiwo, Executive Director, LEAP Africa, “with only a decade to reach the global goals, LEAP Africa is committed to building the capacity of young people as ready talents for the actualization of the SDGs”. One of our strategic pillars as an organization, is raising talents for the sustainable development goals, and the ‘Youth Day of Service’ presents us with a unique opportunity to mobilize the efforts, energies, creativity and agency of young people across board; and to rally an ecosystem of like-minded organizations to support and advance efforts towards localising and achieving the SDGs, he said.
Youth Day of Service is personal leadership in action; a massive movement intended to empower young people, strengthen communities and trigger collective actions that would move the continent closer to achieving the SDGs with 2030 in view. A day when Organizations across sectors including employees, fellows and Alumni members will come together to perform acts of service in their communities leveraging the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework.
Speaking on how people can participate, Taiwo said, participants will carry out physical projects or active virtual advocacy in different locations across Nigeria as either project initiators or become volunteers on existing projects listed on the campaign portal. “Young people are creative problem solvers and this campaign is an opportunity to showcase this. Imagine the amount of change we can create when thousands of young people do acts of service”, he concluded.
The campaign will attract change agents from across Africa who would share their positive change projects from their respective locations via social media using the hashtag #YouthDayofService and #Youth4SDGs. The objective is to spur young people to champion social change in communities and demonstrate by doing; influence others to take on personal leadership and be the change they want to see in society.
