Yiaga Africa, British High Commission Partners to Drive Democratic Youth Participation in Nigeria.

Gilbert Ekugbe

Yiaga Africa and the British High Commission have partnered to increase the level of youth participation in political processes and decision-making within a democratic framework in Nigeria.
According to them, the move is crucial for the development and sustainability of democratic societies in the country, as it allows young people to contribute their ideas, perspectives, and energy to the political system.

Speaking on the sidelines of the 2024 Lagos Digital Democracy fair in Lagos yesterday, the Head, Governance and Stability Block, British High Commission, Magdalene Lagu, said the fair was to recognise the work of Yiaga Africa and Civic Hives in promoting the inclusion of young people in the democratic process in Nigeria.

In her words, “The most critical thing is that we see a lot of activity in the digital space, social media and we are looking at ways to turn all of those into practical actions and how you get young people to really engage and transfer that work from the digital platforms into democratic arena to really engage with different levels of accountability and different levels of yhe governance process.”

She however, pointed out that the engagement of the young people in the general elections last year was a really a good example of progress, affirming that increased participation was a result of the influence of technology and social media in transforming the political and democratic participation of youths.

“We need young people’s engagement and Nigeria is a very young country with an average age of 17 years old. We really need to put this young population into active participation in a way that makes sense for them which gives them hope and motivation,” she urged.
She called on economic managers to encourage and enable youths to engage in accountability processes, with the local government, State institutions and the Federal government and transform all of those from the digital spaces and social media to drive active face-to-face engagement and participation.

Earlier, the Director of Programmes, Yiaga Africa, Cynthia Mbamalu, said the digital democracy fair is an initiative under its turn up democracy project designed to showcase technological tools that could be leveraged to promote citizens engagement, public education and public accountability or demanding accountability from the State.
She pointed out that the idea was to seek ways to use over 12 exhibitors who have initiatives or civic tech solutions to showcase how they can use these tools to promote public education or to engage the government to demand accountability.

“The idea is to showcase what the young people are doing and how State institutions, developmental, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) can even leverage some of these tools to promote sustainable democracy and development in Nigeria,” she stressed.

“A lot of this fair is focused on the democratic space and citizens’ engagement with the government, civic education on the need to engage government and demanding accountability because we need to see government of all levels, both national and subnational and local government on how they are delivering on their campaign promises and even delivering on the welfare of the people,” she added.

Mbamalu said: “For now, we would be starting with Lagos and we are hoping that we can scale it but the first phase of the fair was not limited to Lagos, because we had different States represented, but we are starting based on the available resources to start from Lagos and you Lagos is the home of techies and we would expand after that.”