 Hello, everyone, and welcome to our YALI chat. My name is Macon Phillips, and I am thrilled to be here with you today. I hope everyone has a good video signal who's watching online. I know that there's many more. They're participating in various ways on social media. But we are very excited to have today's YALI network program on engaging youth in the democratic process. And I'm joined today by two really amazing young leaders from Africa who are joining us virtually. One is joining us via video, and the other via audio. I want to just quickly introduce them, and we'll come back to them to have them say a few words. But first, let's thank Sobel, Ingum, for being here from Senegal, as well as Chetty and Gulu for joining us here in Tanzania. I know Chetty is still connecting here on the audio. But Sobel, are you there? Yes, definitely. Hi, Macon. Hi, everyone joining us. I'm very happy to be here. Great. We'll come back to you in just a second. And Chetty, are you on yet? I am on. I'm on. Perfect. All right. So I think we all know how difficult sometimes these transcontinental video conferences can be. But it's quite amazing to actually come into work here in Washington, DC, sit at a desk, and be able to talk to people halfway around the world. And it's part of what has made this YALI network such an amazing project here for the US State Department, for the US government, and for many young people that we've been able to connect with. If you'll indulge me just for a few minutes, I want to remind everyone of just what we're talking about here. A few years ago, actually, President Obama started the YALI initiative, Young African Leaders Initiative. And it started with an event at the White House where we invited young leaders from Africa to come meet with him and to come meet with other partners here in the United States. And it's grown every year. And in fact, just last year, we had 500 young leaders come to the United States for six weeks, have various experiences to develop their skills in the public, private, and nonprofit sector, including Chetty and Sobel. But the bigger story is everyone else that's been part of this as well. When you only have 500 slots, you're really pretty limited in terms of what your reach can be. And certainly, those 500 people had an experience here in the United States. But since we started, we've grown to over 130,000 young leaders who are connected across Africa. And that's you. That's everyone who's watching this right now. You care about the future of your country. You care about the future of the continent. And you care about the partnership with the United States. And it's been very rewarding for us to be part of a team that's providing resources and opportunities for these young leaders to connect with the United States and connect with each other. And the numbers prove it. Every month, we see that this network continues to grow. And hopefully, events like this will continue to demonstrate the value of YALI to all of you. And we certainly look forward to your feedback on other kinds of opportunities that we can provide that will continue to develop as young leaders. But enough about YALI Network generally, let's dive into the program today. We have a really exciting two years ahead for Africa. We have over 20 African countries will have elections in the next two years. And it's just an incredible opportunity for change, an incredible opportunity for civic engagement. And I think as we'll hear from Chetty and Sibel, an incredible opportunity for organizing young people to be more engaged in their community. Because it is true, young people are what are going to be driving a lot of the positive trends we see in terms of democratic engagement, in terms of civic engagement. And I speak from experience there as someone who was involved in President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. I'm sure many of you have paid attention to American politics and certainly Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And it's an understatement to say that young people were a huge part of the president's strategy, the president's constituency, as he successfully won the highest office in the United States. And I'm asked a lot what the secret was. I mean, we used social media, we used all sorts of technology to help organize people. We developed different kind of content and things that spoke to young people in a way that hadn't really been put out there before. But ultimately the secret started with Barack Obama himself. And it started long before the internet, long before we had technologies like the ones we're using today to talk halfway around the world. It started when he had just graduated from school and chose to work as a community organizer in Chicago, walking door to door, organizing people in their communities. And from that experience, he took away the fact that a leader is only good as a people he can inspire to join him. And when we looked at how the presidential campaign ran in 2008 and again in 2012, it was very important to the president and very important to everyone involved in the campaign that we were providing tools and opportunities for people to take control in their own hands. The president had an expression that he liked to say which is that he wasn't asking people to believe in him, he was asking people to believe in themselves. And I think as we look at the elections across Africa and we look at elections here in the United States, particularly when we think about how we can connect with young people, we have to make sure that we don't make it about any single person, but we make it about every person and their own ability to have an impact in their community. And I think we're gonna hear some very good examples of that from the two men that are joining me today. We already have questions coming in, but if you have a question, if you wanna participate, there's a number of ways you can, but the first thing to do is start at yolly.state.gov slash live. You're already watching this if you can see me, but please share that link on Twitter or on Facebook so that other people can join. There's a chat screen there where you can submit questions. We're also keeping an eye on the yolly chat hashtag, Y-A-L-I-C-H-A-T on Twitter. And we have a great team here that's pulling in questions to this computer in front of me, so I apologize, I'm gonna be looking back and forth trying to make sure that we get questions as they come in. But we're really looking forward to this time. And again, thank you so much for joining us. I wanna say in particular a shout out and welcome to a number of viewing parties that we have. Groups of people are getting together to join us. We have one in Central African Republic, in Senegal, in Dakar, in Tanzania, Burundi, again in TS in Senegal, and Abhijan in Cote d'Ivoire. All events that are being organized to join this, and we are seeing from statistics we actually have quite a few more. So very excited to see this turnout today. But I've talked now for way too long. I wanna hand it over to the real experts here, the real interesting folks to hear a little bit about their background. So why don't we start with Chetty, if you can hear me, just to give a few words about your background and the projects that you work on. And then we'll head over to Sobel and then we'll dive right into questions. So Chetty. Yes, hi everybody, I'm glad to be here, I think before anything I would say a big thank you to Yalini for organizing this, to the U.S. Embassy for Austiners. I have a group of young Tanzanians here, we're talking about young people, so I have about five young people here with me. So thank you, thank you, also the online audience for this. My background is more from a communication perspective. So what you realize is in the course of this communication, I'm not a political analyst. So I will be talking more from a communication perspective. I'm an entrepreneur, I started my own communication agency about three years ago and use a vehicle that I've been using to craft the campaigns that I've done so far and I will be using this also to do the same for the voter education internal campaign. Just to give you a little bit of an overview of who this campaign is about, basically we're targeting young voters and our primary target audience is age group 18 to 24 and we also hope to make a spillover effect on age group 25 to 35. Now just to kind of like highlight the importance of these numbers, these two age groups, they make 60% of the entire electorate of Tanzania. So we think that if we talk of democracy in Tanzania, then we definitely are talking about these young fellows. And I think if I could just quickly give you the background because I haven't spent a lot of time in the political space but what actually had kind of like put me here is, you know, a story which I would love to share with you. And basically I went to observe a bi-election last year as part of my routine marketing intelligence as such. When I went there, I was struck by two main incidents. First, most of the rallies, you know, went to these rallies, we found out that majority of people who went there were actually coming from outside the constituency. So they were there to support politicians and not necessarily coming from within that particular constituency. And we did some more digging and we found out that people from that place actually were not interested in to vote, yeah? So, you know, that experience when we was followed by a number of other questions as such, but I will keep sharing this in the course of the discussion. But it was evident that people have lost interest in engaging, I mean, to be typically engaged and to participate in the electoral process. So that was the main reason why I decided to use the expertise I have in communication and the company I have, you know, to come up with the fortification campaign that could help turn around the situation. Okay, thank you. So let's head back over to Sobel. Before we do, I just wanted to mention, I neglected to note that Abuja is also joining us. So we just had a note come in, we have more viewing parties as we're going. So welcome Abuja. But let's head over to Sobel. Save a few words, introduce yourself, and then we'll dive right into questions. Hi, everyone. Sobel Azitngam, I'm a Mandela Washington fellow from Senegal. I'm the founder of Social Change Factory, which is a center of civic leadership. Our mission is to strengthen citizenship, feeling of belonging and youth participation. And yeah, this is what we do at Social Change Factory. We have another branch which is more axed on social marketing because like Cherry, my background is also communication and marketing. And during our experiences, we saw that like social marketing can be a great answer to make a change and to bring young people in another level of participation and civic engagement. Just wanted to share with you just a bit about the Void-Ejian Project in Voice of Youth. It's a project we were launching in 2012 around the Senegalese elections. It was a very important election for so many reasons. And we just saw that young people wasn't really engaged and aware about these elections and about many things about the democratic process. So we decided to launch something, to launch a project and to try to contribute to fix this issue. And we use a lot of social media to do that. We innovate in terms of building applications for e-votes to train young people. We did a drive on the country to sensitize and to inform young people about the process of elections, giving them tips, giving them advice about what they have to do according to their own situation. It was very personal advice, too. And yes, so this project was really answering to a lake that's happened in the country at this time. And we tried to do something that works in of where we mobilize 100 and 150,000 people online and 200,000 people offline with a great team of young students that I was with in school. And today, after all this work with Void-Ejian, there was a lot of order and not fixed issue that we still have to fix. And that's why we created the Social Change Factory as a center of leadership to not only sensitize people during the election for the vote, but to build a real feeling of belonging to his nation, to his community by citizenship program, community service, and that's what we do today. Great. Okay, thanks, Chetty. I wanna jump right into the questions because we're getting quite a few on all sorts of topics. But I wanna start with one that's a very difficult one, but a very important one, and one that certainly we've heard from a number of people. This one comes from Yal in Cote d'Ivoire, who asks, when so many youth have no jobs, how do we get them to engage in the democratic process instead of falling into the trap of violence? And this has been a concern we've heard from a number of people. I know that there's members of the Yali network in Nigeria, for example, who are involved with Vote Not Fight, which is a really interesting organization there, but I'm sure many others are involved in this issue. I was wondering if the two of you could comment on this idea of violence around elections and steps that you think people can take to help reduce the threat of violence. Why don't we start with Chetty? Yes, so I think violence just doesn't happen. It's the result of frustration that other people can also use and capitalize on to make sure that things go in their interest. And by this I mean, most of the time violence is not started by people on the ground, it's started by other players within the political space who want to kind of, you know, and see if there's conflicts to their best interests, but we can also neglect that violence can also be organic in the sense that the frustration and frustration builds up, then people get too frustrated and they end up resulting to violence. So I think the first thing that we're trying to do through our campaign is trying to address the need for civic engagement as a buffer zone or kind of like a hurdle or a prevention measure for violence because we believe that if people are civically engaged, if people realize that violence doesn't really take them, you know, places that they want to go will end up with catastrophic results, then they will appreciate the need to engage in the civic process, you know, electing leaders that will fulfill their, you know, deliver to their needs. So the way we structure this campaign, we have, we have found ourselves in situations where we are forced to preempt situations where we will face violence, but before we get there, especially for situation on the ground in Tanzania, we're trying to address the fact that you guys, you're young people, you're energetic, you're the ones that, you know, the entire political machinery can use you, you know, to start violence or you can build this procession to a point, to a voting point where you, you know, you end up finding yourself, you know, involved in violence. So what do you do? Make sure that you, you're civically engaged, make sure you vote for people that you want, so that, you know, and to actually do this as a process, it's not something that you do, change doesn't happen overnight. So we're trying to address the fact that, you know, change is a long-term process, but it starts with you being civically engaged and casting your vote for the leaders that you think will deliver in your best interest. And then, you know, for, when we look at the different scenarios where violence could occur in Tanzania, I think common in Tanzania, yeah? So our worry is less of, you know, dealing with violence now and more of how to prevent violence in the future. But at the same time, if we escalate this to high levels and look at, you know, how to prevent this, I think for most of African countries, it lies on the government itself or the governance process, the leadership, yeah? Because if you look at the, some of the frustrations people have right now is, you know, they're not sure if their vote will make a difference. Yeah? They think the system is so controlled in a sense that it will go one way, you know? So they don't have, they don't have chance to make change. So this is what we also try to talk to the authorities that it's about time is having this conversation with people to be trust between the system and the electorate so that they, you know, they're gonna have faith in the system. They can believe that their vote will actually make a difference. Great. So Belle, do you have anything to add to that? Yeah, I just want to say that to Yaw that his question is really pertinent. And I definitely agree that it's very hard to get like citizen who don't know like where the next meal will be and to come into the voting process, that's make a lot of sense. So the challenge here for me, it's like twofold. We want to reinforce the democratic process and system in Africa from my hand, but also we need to create like an environment where the basic needs of people are being met and they feel they can afford to get involved in the vote. But I think also that according to this issue, the vote is also a way to change the system and to get in the new systems that allow us to access in the more safe, to live in the more safe community by the democratic choice we are going to meet. So for me, Yaw the challenge would be to find a way to convince young people that if they want to change life, if they are suffering enough and they wanna live another life, maybe the vote is also a way to get there. Right, right, absolutely. Well, I wanna actually keep going along that line and Chetty said something earlier that made me bring up another question here. You were talking a little bit about people feeling like their vote doesn't matter and that's certainly something we have dealt with here in the United States and I know it's an issue around the world. Part of this is also a generational issue and there was a great question we had from the Democratic Republic of Congo that I'll throw out to both of you and maybe we'll start with Sobel on this one and then come back to Chetty who made the original point. The question is, I noticed that one of the biggest contributing factors to youth's lack of interest in elections comes from the older generations repeatedly telling younger citizens that there is no point in voting. How can we improve the attitude about voting not only among youth, but among older generations? So I would love to hear both of you comment on your experience with this generational approach to voting and how we need to think about an older generation as we're trying to activate a younger generation. Sobel, do you have any comments on that? I think that this question is excellent in the way that today what we see as a request and energy that put on like putting the vote as the principle and the most important democratic way of expression for me is not enough and this is what this question means. Is citizenship means only vote? No, to bring people to vote, we have to build citizens first and that's what we don't do anymore. And for different generation that have like different relationship and approach to the vote, that means also for those generations, they don't have been educated the same way to be citizens. But today there is no more educations to be citizens program that strengthen the citizenship of people. And you just don't really care about that. What they want is find a job, it's to earn money and they feel maybe manipulated because we talk about them to be democrat and to be citizen and to vote only like once every five years for presidential elections. So maybe, and that's what we try to do at social chain factory today, it's to build a citizenship, to build this feeling of belonging to a nation to that's going like higher than being only a simple word but that have to be a feeling that have to be actions and that can build like a global citizenship and the way that young people can feel that they are part of some things. And I think that also, yeah, and I think that Sherry will be okay with me on that. Communication, social marketing and civic engagement from very early and even maybe at school could be a way to change this approach that young people have to with politics, with votes and with civic responsibilities. Great, thank you, Chetty. Yeah, I think historically African communities in African communities, all the people have always had the final say. So I think it's something that we have inherited from the previous generations and it's still kinds of hovers around the present situations on the ground. But at the same time, what we're noticing from the millennia is, like this dot-com generation, as most people like to call it. I think they're beginning to, there's a trend, there's sort of like a culture shift between how things used to be to how the generation, the present generation want things to be, because they are growing up in a very different environment. They're growing up surrounded by very different influential sources of influence if I would say. I think this, we sort of like, I would like to tell the person that asked this question that it's not a static situation, it's a situation that is changing from how it used to be to what is gonna be in the future. But so this is what we do around that space. Number one, we associate the present, the present as we see from our older generation. And the question becomes, are you satisfied with the way that old folks are living right now? From the economic standpoint, from how they, from the administration itself, to things like the power that they have as citizens to actually run the country, to influence the decisions of the government and things like that. So within that space, we found an opportunity to capitalize on the fact that youth won't change. So we connect that with the narrative that, look, if you want to do things the old way, things will always remain that way. But if you want change, yes, you need to listen to these old folks and then decide for yourself if it makes sense, if it doesn't make sense in the present, in the present, in the present circumstance. But at the same time, I would like to go back to Sobel's point about civic engagement. What I've seen so far, we, most of the democratic institutions focus more on voter education. And voter education, basically, the way they put it out there is, this is how you vote, this is the registration process, you need this and this to go to the polling station. And they end there. But they don't talk about civic engagement. They don't talk, they don't make that a long-term process. And in reality, it needs to be a long-term process. If we're gonna focus on voter education, the Tanzanian election cycle, for example, is five years apart. Therefore, we're gonna spend a few months or one year leading up to the election, talking about all voter education and stuff like that, and talk very little about civic engagement. And then we wait four years between those two cycles to start to have that conversation again. So obviously, if we continue like this, we'll find ourselves, you know, constantly in the same situation. So I think it's important to actually emphasize on civic education. And then when time comes, talk about voter information and things like that. But you need to get people to be excited about change, you know, about spearheading that change process. And I think, you know, what we're trying to do is to make this campaign we're doing, Peggy Chata, we called it a hardy before. We wanna make this a long-term process. For now, we'll focus on the elections that are coming up and the referendum. But eventually, we don't want this to stop, you know, in October when the elections, you know, take place. We want this to continue. Our role model is rock to vote. So you seem to have rock to vote in the thing, you know, probably because of the election cycles in the United States is kind of, you know, it allows that to be like that. But most importantly, we wanna take that model and make this platform a continuous process. Yeah, I think that's a, those are both really great perspectives. And I wanna follow on, Chetty, to what you just said about the fact that these elections come, United States every four years, and other countries every five or two, or they just come, you know, every few years. And it's, as someone who's been part of a presidential campaign and then moved into the White House, I've seen firsthand that it's a challenge to bring along this constituency, this organization that you've created in the campaign paradigm, the campaign context, and bring it into governing. You know, as we all know, political campaigns, candidates who are running for office are really prioritizing how they can motivate their supporters, how they can make sure that the people who should support them are connected to the voting booth, how they're making sure that they're turning out the vote, just like rock to vote sort of looks at overall, but really making sure that everyone who should support them is voting. And on top of that, they're trying to convince other people to support them as well, but they're really focused on their supporters and how they can grow that supporter base. But once you move into governing, you're accountable to everyone. And that's, I think, a really amazing transition in any democracy to have a very competitive election where people are pointing out what's good about them, but also pointing out what's negative about the other person, and then one candidate wins, and all of a sudden they are responsible and accountable to every citizen, including those that didn't support them in the election. And it's certainly the sign of a healthy democracy to make that transition peacefully, but it's not easy. It's not easy to move from an organization that's focused on winning to an organization that's focused on governing for everyone. But to your point about how we can use these moments around elections when we do have a lot more attention, when we do have a lot more people focused on the issues in their country to increase civic participation, it's really important to be thinking about that now. And I would boil that all down to say, as we look at any individual country, all of you watching, as you think about the elections that are coming up in your country and all of the work that's being done to organize ahead of those, ask yourself what happens the day after the election and who's thinking about how these networks will continue to be engaged? Who's thinking about how we can take this level of interest in issues of the country and continue to have that dialogue even after the dust has settled and the winner has been decided, because as Chetty just pointed out, and as I know, Sabel works on himself as well, that civic engagement, that's the hard work, but we don't wanna miss the opportunity of these elections to help drive that forward. So let's go to a more basic question. I think it was just mentioned, I think Chetty said it's the dot com generation. This is a very basic one, I certainly have some thoughts about it, but we have a question, how will you reach your audiences? And sort of basic ideas, does social media like Facebook help communicate your message? And I wanna add on just one additional question, and you might say, well, of course it does, social media really helps me communicate with more people, it's cheap, it's pretty easy to use, but there's two issues I think that probably frustrate people using social media. One is internet connectivity and understanding that not everyone's connected, but that's a growing portion. And the other is that there's a lot more noise now in the information system and a lot of different perspectives and a lot of things that aren't true or a lot of things that are. So can you talk a little bit about the impact of social media as an organizing tool, as a communications tool, and perhaps talk about some of the opportunities it presents, but also talk about some of the challenges that this new media presents, both of you as organizers. Let's start with Chetty here and get his perspective. Yeah, absolutely. So social media is one of the biggest components of our campaign. And I think later on, I will talk about another mobile application that we're building. And again, it's another information tool that is based on the fact that things like internet and mobile infrastructure in Tanzania have made a huge difference and took huge steps in the past few years. So basically we look at the numbers, right? The target age group 24 to, I mean 18 to 24 has about 6.6 million Tanzanians, yeah? And if you, if you look at that number without necessarily thinking about it right now, think about the entire online population in Tanzania. On platforms like Facebook, we have over 2 million Tanzanians right now. So even though it's still limited, but we still, we still feel that there's a huge number, good enough to create a momentum that can extend to other people offline because someone picks a message online and they go tell their friends and they become an agent of that particular message that we want to push. And again, I will go back to the numbers. I spoke earlier about the mobile infrastructure. Right now, mobile phone penetration in Tanzania is about 62%, yeah? So if you use it well, and within that 52%, about 60% of it have smart phones. So smart phones have access to internet. And with that, they unlock like a huge, huge potential, you know, reaching people through this, through social media. And at the same time, the other, the other area that we are thinking of using social media, I mean, one of the other reason is most of these other media outlets are highly regulated and very expensive. So if you're designing a campaign and you want to be cost effective and you're looking at the numbers, now I understand most of the political campaigns, especially in Africa, haven't yet gotten to a point where they are tracking, they're doing like hardcore tracking of these numbers, but we do this in the commercial space and we want to bring this to the political space as well. So we're very keen on the numbers. So if we have potential of reaching, you know, 62%, I mean, 30% of the country, which if you do these numbers, we'll be about 20% now of the whole country. We have potential to reach that segment using social media cost effectively. It means a lot to a campaign because you can use those resources now. You know, if you have more resources, you can use them to do other stuff, activate things on the ground and get people more connected and push your message. But if you allow me, I'd like to expand more on technology as a whole and not just social media by itself. And when you think of it, you have some of the products like M-Pesa, for example, is a product that is mobile based and has changed the entire banking industry, especially money transfer. Right now, the majority of money transfer actually doesn't happen on mobile platforms than the banks. So if the mobile infrastructure has been able to unlock this much potential, it has been able to create space for citizens to be able to transfer money back and forth. There's no reason why we can use the same to push for civic information and campaign messages that are political. So I think there's a huge potential going forward and we tend to keep using this as one of the most important pieces of the campaign. Well, let's head over to Sobel and I'd love to also hear, I mean, talk about the opportunities, but it's not all roses, it's not all positive. I mean, maybe you could comment a little too on some of the challenges that you see as more and more people are using social media. Yeah, definitely more and more people are using social media actually. In 2012, when we run our project, Voidision, there was only 20% of the population of the country that has access to internet and today we have at 50%. So the result we had like three years ago would be like so much better this year if we were doing the same operation. The thing is the statistics that CDU shares are applicable mostly in other countries in Africa in terms of rates of the youth population and the orders. And this rate, it's also applicable to the internet and to social media. So what is important for me on this, when young people don't really think it's important to vote or to be citizens just because they don't have maybe the information, it's to go where they are, it's to identify what they do, what they like, what they don't and try to build the message that the message can fit on what they used to do. And what we have done, it's like we have used Facebook, we have been like an application who was like a evote application and young people was able to exercise the process of voting on Facebook with caricature and like a very short description of the candidate, very transparent and very objective ways. And this application had 2,500 participants in like two weeks and it was incredible and media talk a lot about it because it was an innovation. And I think that the challenge on social media is not like say, okay, there is a lot of young people there, let's reach like 100,000 people or 200,000 people. It's about the content, what we can share that will be read because people using, young people using social media don't read, they don't like to read, they want like very short things with image. That was the statistics set. So let's try to build content that they can feel connected with. It's about information that have to be very key and relevant information about the process. So, okay, there is a lot of information about yes, guys, you have to vote because vote is important but there is a few less information about how to vote. Okay, for someone that don't have birth certificate from there, what you have to do to go to vote? So we have to package like, you see like according to the situations, different a way from this step, you have to do this and this and this and this to be able to have your ID, your electoral card to vote. And I think that the fact that internet is growing so fast in Africa, it's something very positive for young people and for organization or people that want to involve in this civic engagement and democratic process because we have the target, definitely. And now we have to build stronger project with maybe the support that can be the moral support or the financial support of the state to make citizenship something fun, has a shady say, something cool for them to feel like, okay, I'm a fun guy in my life but also citizenship is something fun. So I have to be involved in it and being a citizen is something nice and something cool and it's a part of my responsibilities because yes, I have right, but also I have duties and give like the most information possible and built in a long term, as you say, make a long term citizen. That's what we need. That's a great point. And I wanna bring up a question from Isaac that's along the point you just made, Sebel, which gets it out. He said, my country is hosting local government elections. How can I help this election to be a success? So as you were just talking about how to make citizenship cool, I think it's also sometimes these national elections feel so far removed. This is just gonna be another person down in the Capitol doing something and it doesn't really impact me on day to day. And obviously local elections and local governments are a really important component of civic engagement. So could you talk a little bit about how you would approach, first I'll have to answer this question, how can someone get involved at the local level and how is that different than, say, these national elections that we talk about, but also just the difference between local government versus national government as you've seen it? I think the first thing we can do to support the vote in the democratic system is to vote by ourselves. Then it's to convince people we personally know to vote and that's what I can say to Isaac. It's the thing that every single person concedes that this is important should to do. And if we do that, hmm, I think we will improve the rates of people that are voting. Then if we want to do something in a more large scale, I think we have to identify the various factors that keep people from voting and then work on the solutions. People, and it's different about our country. People can feel manipulated here, can feel just that this is too complicated here, that that's not make any sense here. So when we identify those different issues, I think we can build an answer according to the target we have. And I think that some people might not see the importance of voting. So we will need to explain the why and the why is important. How can we create a link between young people and the fact of voting? Making them understand that the vote affects their personal life. And if they do vote that can change things for themselves and if they don't, that also can have like bad effect in their own life. I think this is not only the role of either the local government or the national government to do this. Definitely they have a part to do. But also the civil society have is a major role to do on this. It can be on school, at work. We have to like all be conscious that we are citizens and this is a global or national or local responsibility if you want. So yes, I will going back with these points and I think like take the civic engagement as a responsibility that every part of the sector, it can be public, private, civil society have to put in the main important rules and argument on their politics will start to change things and educate young people on the way to be a citizen and to be able to understand why and the vote is important and use the vote as a way to express themselves in their society. For you, it's also the point is that elections don't just happen every few years. Every day in between you can elect to be a more engaged citizen. It's not just about voting in a booth. It's about making a choice each day to be engaged whether it's in your school or whether it's in other local institutions. You don't just wait around for an election every few years. Let's head over to Chetty. I don't know if you have any comments to add to that about the sort of local versus national dynamic but I wanna throw in one additional question for you that we got that's really on the point that Sibel was just talking about. This one came from Abuja from our American Center there from some of the folks that are watching. How are you able to engage young people, young communities involved in grassroots to vote based on issues and not their own personal incentives? So we talk a lot about how you can connect an election to an individual's own future. But a lot of times people are voting on things that matter to a lot of people but may not matter to themselves and they have to be able to look past their own personal incentives and think about a larger community dynamic. So can you talk a little bit about how you make that argument to young people who may tend to focus on just what's right in front of them and encourage them to think bigger? All right, so I think before I get to that just to add on to the previous comments, Bill, man, I think what we see between local government elections and the main government elections, central government elections is, one, the local government, they all get collectively, they all get the same air time and promotion, get people talking about, oh, there's an election, there's an election. But when you look at the individuals where you look at the number of issues that crop up, when you look, the central government elections tend to be more collective, you know? As opposed to local government elections where you're dealing with, in Tanzania, that happens like at one level and that means so many streets across the country are going through these elections. It's very difficult for interest of one region or one street to surface and make a national headline. As opposed to central government elections. So what you'll find is organizers of individual local government elections have a much harder time to make a headline by having an opportunity to reach their people on an individual level because the streets are put together in a way that is a very small geographical location that will be involved. But I will give an example, going back to your question now about how youth can look at individual interests versus collective interests, one good example is a story that came up of the local government elections that happened in Tanzania in December. So I won't mention names, but this particular street, a group of youth decided that they were tired of the existing leadership and they decided to vote their own friend to go to take office, the local government office. And what they did, they organized themselves and they all went to vote that day and this guy became the winner by default because if all those young people vote for you by virtue of their number, you don't have competition. So what I think it could be a good lesson out of this is when youth are organized, when you look at an issue, this happened at a very local level, but if we can take this to a regional level, if we can take this to a state level, when young people decide to circle around certain issues, then they must understand, especially within Africa where they make 60% of the electorate, they have power to change the political landscape. So I think that's one thing that we need to make young people understand, that if they start looking at their individual interests, which may not be the interests of folks across the other constituency, then they lose the power to make the difference. But if they come together, then they have opportunity to make change. So that is part of the communication that we're trying to put out there throughout our campaign. Yep, okay, that's a great point. I'm gonna take a question actually that was submitted for me because I wanna make sure that we get to Patrick from Kenya. But I think this will be something that both of you will have some experience with too. The Barack Obama team for the 2008 and 2012 elections was phenomenal in terms of community organizing. What are the specific tools communities can learn from the Obama campaigns to engage communities in the electoral process? It's a great question, Patrick, and I should say I was involved in the 2008 campaign but worked at the White House during the 2012 re-election campaign. So I can comment on my experience in 2008, but I have a lot of good friends who are involved in 2012 and certainly heard a lot about that campaign too, but it wasn't something I was directly involved in. That said, I think there was a strategy that's worth talking about. And certainly there's a whole host of tools, a whole host of strategies that were useful to the campaign both in 2008 and 2012. But when we talk about tools, I think it's really important just to step back and look at how much these tools have changed. We just think about where you were in 2008 and where your country was, all of you, in terms of access to internet, in terms of the prevalence of social media tools. And all these new technologies that people tend to focus on with each election. The pace at which these things are changing, and Chetty mentioned mobile money, that's something that is just starting to happen here in the United States. And it's something that is really growing quite quickly. When we think about how rapidly these new tools can come onto market and grow, it's really important to understand that they may be replaced in four years by new tools. And that really what we need to be looking at is some of the fundamental strategies that we employ and then find the right tools to make those strategies successful. So one strategy that seems very basic, but I've personally struggled with time and again and I've seen organizations really struggle with is understanding who you're trying to reach. Understanding that when you look at a country, when you look at an entire electorate, you're not just looking at one audience. That within that one audience, there are many different types of groups. And that a group of opponents who support, who are very strong supporters of your opponent in an election is a very different group than obviously your ardent supporters. And as I mentioned earlier, in the political context, in the electoral context, prioritizing how you communicate with the supporters to grow that support base. And not just speaking to everyone and just hoping that it gets to the right people is very important. And so when we look at audience targeting, that can be as basic as understanding geography. Where are the areas of your country where you have the strongest support? Where are the, who are the types of people who tend to support you? Now what's really challenging about this kind of strategy is, you can end up polarizing. If you do it too well and you aren't an accessible candidate, you can end up just being the candidate that is serving a small portion or a very narrow portion. So you have to make sure that on one hand, you are providing tools and empowering your supporters to help you win an election. But on the other hand, that you are available and accessible and communicating what you stand for with everyone. And those are two different activities. But what was really exciting to see in 2008 and we saw this again in 2012, and I think this is a really special thing about the Obama campaign, but we've certainly seen it in other campaigns, is that by organizing your supporters, you can empower them to actually reach to people who might not support you or might not be engaged at all to make more effective arguments about the issues at hand than Barack Obama, than other members of the campaign, that your supporters can actually be your best messengers. It's easy to think about Barack Obama or other well-known politicians who are on television as your most effective communicators, but we all know that our neighbors, our classmates, our children or our grandparents, they are all really influential in our lives. And some of them are already engaged and the issues, they're already civically engaged. We need to figure out how we can motivate them to reach that person in their network that may not be. Because that's when you really have both a empowered group of supporters, but also a really effective way of reaching people who may not be engaged or maybe skeptical and bring them along to your view. That's a strategy that we're seeing tons of tools whether it's Facebook or whether it's whatever the next new social network is in four or eight years. But underneath it all, it's really understanding the differences of audiences as you look across the population. So I wonder if Chetty or Sebel, if you have any thoughts about how you think about audience, how you think about prioritizing groups of people as you look at your country, I'm sure you don't just sort of go to the mountaintop and try to shout as loud as you can. You have to think about how to really prioritize your resources. Do you have any approaches to audience segmentation or audience targeting that may be helpful for folks who are tuning in? Kind of different in terms of perspective when you try to reach an audience for a political group or like you do it only from the civil society for the just in terms of like a civic mobilization. In terms of what you said about the political mobilization behind a vision, behind a program, behind a group actually, a way of think is the one I believe on too. I think when you in the other side you are not mobilizing people like for any candidates or for any political group and you just want like people understand that they have to vote because not of someone or a vision but because they are citizens and this is one of their duties. This is another way to manage it because you don't have the same arguments and I think the strategy you will use won't be the same. I think the strategy you use in this way or you are talking from the civil society if I can say that will be more didactic and based on civic arguments and not on programs either economy or agriculture and things like that. And definitely this program will be the ones they will have to choose. But in terms of strategy I think this is quite different in the way to do it, in the way to think it and even the support like the social media or the online or offline events can be the same. Chadi, do you have any comments? Yes, yes. You made very good points about targeting overall like moving from the tools to the strategy because I think that's where it all starts. And for our campaign we definitely spend time trying to make sure that our targeting is on point. And with that we do a lot of studies around okay once we pick this audience how do we communicate? You know, how do we customize that message to speak to this group? So what we have done for example with this campaign is we are targeting the majority of the electorate but we understand that we have a responsibility of communicating the same message to the broader audience. So what we do is we package our communication and if you're looking at 100% then we spent 80% on our target audience which now you have the primary audience but you also think of the spillover, immediate spillover. If I put out a song of an artist who's training right now I'm sure that I will capture majority of the youth and people going in their mid-30s there will still be attention to this. But at the same time if I'm spending my resources then I will put 80% in there and then reserve the rest to have the same conversation with people outside these age groups to make sure that they also understand because this age group doesn't live in isolation. And like you say before, you don't want, you don't spend a lot of energy there and probably this audience is influenced by someone else and they come in and communicate something which is not in line with what you're trying to do. I think you won't be very effective. And with that, going back to just a bit of the tools is most of the time we campaign planners, they quickly start to think of the tools but I like the comment you made earlier about how quickly the tools changed. And so when we approach our campaigns, we usually go and find out what is the most effective tool on the ground applicable to the market that we want market or the audience that we are targeting. I'll give you an example. If you're in a region like Arusha, talking to folks between 2018 and 50s, hip hop music is one of the strongest platform you can never have because it unites almost the whole town. But the situation is different if you come to Dar. It's Dar Islam. Dar Islam is more, you know, the varieties in Dar, it's more diverse. You know, people have different interests. So you can, you don't have that, you can use such kind of a tool or platform to engage all these guys, yeah? So we tend to be creative and apply tools that make the most sense or they're already popular among the audience that we are targeting. Okay, great. So we're running towards the end of our time here but I want to do one more round of a question here. But first, before we wrap up, if folks want to connect with you or learn more about you, Chetty, I know you mentioned you were working on a mobile app and I know both of you are involved both within your own country but also generally with the network. So how can folks get in touch with you who have follow-up questions or want to learn more about your work? Why don't we start with Chetty and then we'll come back to Sobel. Right, so we can use the tool. So there are folks within the Yali network that we are connected through the Yali network itself. We have contacts, we are naming faces books which went out with a lot of contacts. So you find my contacts there in Tanzania, Chetty and Guru and feel free to email me to drop a message through my phone number or my social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whichever you find convenient. And that also goes to the broader audience. If you have a broader audience out there listening and feel free to drop a message. One of the things that I tried to do from other regions, you know, I had a call with Sobel earlier and it was interesting how the amount of similarity, the amount of same issues that we're dealing with though we are from different geographical location. So I think those will be the best ways of reaching me. Great, Sobel, how can people get in touch with you? Yeah, yeah, everybody can reach me on social media. My all social media, I can do the same. It's Sobel and Gom. That is Twitter, Facebook. Mostly I'm mostly a Facebook user and Skype is also Sobel.Gom and emails is also Sobel.Gom. So yeah, I would be happy to receive any kind of questions or contribution, opinion and stuff like that. Great, thank you. And I know that we weren't able to get to all of the questions today. So we're gonna get to more of them in a blog post that we'll post to yolly.state.gov a little bit later. We'll work with Sobel and Chetty to get those answers put together. But I wanna end with one more question and it's sort of, it's my own question for you but it starts, it came from this one. What strategies can you suggest to young people when assessing candidates and deciding who to vote for? And I picked up on a theme in this conversation I think is a really important one which is as we look at youth in elections, it's not just about the elections that really the challenge is to have, to look at every day in between election day and how we can promote civic engagement among young people and that's how we end up having better results when it comes time for elections. But that said, we are talking about leadership and we are talking about choosing people to lead a city, to lead a country. And as to leaders who are working in your own communities, I was wondering if you could just quickly talk about, based on your experience, what makes a good leader? I mean, this has been an issue, this is the core issue for the Young African Leaders Initiative and as to people who are quite accomplished or doing really important work and a valuable part of the network. I'd love just to hear from you a few thoughts about what makes a good leader, whether it's evaluating whether to vote for them or whether it's how you've tackled challenges in your own work, advice for other folks that are tuning in who may be looking at you and saying, gosh, I wanna do something like that. I wanna be successful like these guys have. What makes a good leader? Let's start with Chetty. I think, you know, my position of a good leader is I can make a long list of the qualifications that I would put out there. But I would look at, I would use examples of some of the leaders and all people will have, they all understand the position of who these guys are. But they will make a good demonstration of what I believe a good leader is. I think President Obama is a good leader and says that he's been able to talk to the grassroots to have the grassroots, to talk to the grassroots and make a statement like, you know, believe in yourself. Because most of the leaders talk about, you know, believe in me, you know, and to me, that is the coffee right there. Because you need to look inside you and look at the things that matter to you and decide if this leader represents those things. And of course, you know, the long-term perspective that we need to keep in mind is that it's not just about us. Yeah, so when we want to be leaders, when we want to choose a leader, it comes down to a leader who has a long-term vision as well. You know, it's not just about today. Whatever we enjoy today is the result of hard work that people before us, you know, the sacrifices that they made to get here. And the other point I think I would like to make and, you know, specifically for countries like African countries, the founding father of Tanzania and Arizona, the good leaders that I would, you know, I would put out there. Because every time he stood out, he stood out for the best interests of the people. He made mistakes, but, you know, clearly, you could see from, it was evident, you know, it didn't take a rocket science to figure that out of political analysts. You could see that this guy, you know, was passionate about his country and he was trying to, you know, steer the country towards, you know, a better future. And the other comment that I would make in this for the interests of Tanzanians is we tend to politicize issues. You know, we choose leaders based on where they come from, which party, you know, who their friends are. And it has been a perspective of the older generation and right now it seems to be, you know, tripling down to the younger generation right now. So, you know, on that note, I would like to challenge my fellow Tanzanians in these coming elections to be critical. You know, to think of Tanzania before they think of political parties and all these affiliations. Yeah, well said, well said. So, Sebel, we'll give you the final word here on what you find are the characteristics of a great leader. Yeah, I will start, Meikon, if you follow me by the challenge you talk about, which is the civic engagement. What can we do to integrate, to have the most strong civic engagement from youth to make them good citizens? And I think that this is something used to happen and have in some countries, which is the civic service. I think that if we were able to build a kind of civic service, that would be applicable in schools at the same importance that any other discipline and make that all young people that have to graduate to also have do community service, to have learned about the civic and political history and feel as a citizen. I think that will contribute to build a stronger citizenship and a feeling of belonging. That is the base for when you have knowledge and these feelings, you, in a kind of way, are obliged to do things that are more relevant, are more transparent, are more durable and positive that have a positive social impact in your community. And I think this is also, that's what contributes to make you a good leader because you have two things. You have your mind and you have your heart. Maybe your mind is what you know, your heart is what you feel you are and what you love and you love your community and you want to use your mind to do good things for your community. And I think for me, this is also one of the main value of a leader. The ability is to listen what people say that they need to look what's really happened and what on the perspective you see it. Think about the solution you can bring. Be able to mobilize other people than you to share your idea, to share your vision and do whatever possible to make it happen and to make this change possible. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. Well said. I want to thank both of you for joining today and I want to thank those of you who stayed about 15 minutes past our time here for tuning in. This is a very important issue as I mentioned at the beginning. We have over 20 elections over the next two years across Africa and the United States is committed to supporting a peaceful democratic process. I know that the threat of violence around elections is something we hear a lot about and we're very eager to get more feedback on things we can do to help leaders in Africa address that. But I think that the larger issue is civic engagement and how we can support young people being engaged with their government, with their communities, not just at elections, but every day in between. And when we look at the members of the Young African Leaders Initiative Network, including the Mandela Fellows, but such a broader network of over 130,000 young leaders, I think we can all feel good that we're taking some good steps to increasing that kind of civic engagement. And ultimately, we do that not just by connecting young leaders in Africa with the United States, but in truth, the major way that we can move that forward is by connecting each of you with one another because as much as the United States wants you to be successful, ultimately it's up to each of you. So I encourage each of you to reach out to one another, to find out where you can support one another, and to keep up the great work. It's a privilege to be part of this network and I look forward to the next one of these events. So thanks a lot everyone and have a great day.