Youth Training on an Inclusive Digital Advocacy Toolkit

On March 26, IFES collaborated with AGENDA partner AYO to hold an Inclusive Digital Advocacy Toolkit online training to build young people’s capacity to conduct virtual inclusive advocacy and digital outreach. The training was facilitated by IFES Senior Inclusion Specialist Rebecca Aaberg, IFES Inclusion Program Officer Rachel Arnold and IFES Youth Engagement Program Officer Sarah Timreck. Participants were introduced to IFES’s newly developed Digital Advocacy Toolkit through a video presentation. The training emphasized the benefits of social media advocacy which allows youth and their organizations to broaden the impact of their advocacy and expand their reach to a more diverse audience. Social media advocacy enables young people to personalize and reinforce advocacy messages tailored to target audiences. Participants engaged in several online group exercises to  identify which social media platforms should be used to reach out to youth stakeholders and learned how to use storytelling to convey their messages. A total of 30 youth from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, and Pakistan, including 17 women and 2 persons with disabilities, participated in the training.