Middle East/ Northern Africa
06.05.2021

Y-LEAD has successfully promoted Local Council Elections in Egypt

During 2019 and 2020 almost all activities of our project Y-LEAD with its multi-pronged approach were implemented successfully, despite the COVID-19-Pandemic. In 23 governorates in Egypt we raised the awareness about Local Councils in Egypt among youth and women and moreover trained possible future candidates that are willing to run for office. 
 

The project fulfilled all its stages, which consist of five main work packages: 1) Awareness Campaign 2) Online-Survey (nationwide) and Creation of Policy-Papers 3) Realizing (cross-sectoral) Local Initiatives 4) Capacity Building and Empowerment for Youth and Women 5) Creating Sustainable Formats for Dialogue (Roundtables and Forums). 

Youth and women in the 23 governorates were provided with the necessary awareness on local elections to prepare them to run as candidates, through building their capacities on how to facilitate dialogue, include marginalized groups and reach out to local actors. The participants were able to establish cross-sectoral networks to implement local initiatives of their design, resulting in a strong coalition of actors from different actors across the governorates. 

According to the Development Assistance Criteria (DAC) of evaluation, Y-lead has proved to be relevant to the needs of Egyptian youth and women, given their limited awareness of and participation in the public sphere. It also effectively and efficiently managed to achieve its overall objective, which is to increase the social and political participation among youths and women in the public and political spheres, in a timely manner and despite the outbreak of Covid-19. 

In terms of numbers, Y-lead’s “Helios” simulation game impacted 3,268 participants, making them aware of the role of local councils in society. Many of them showed interest in running for local council elections once they are announced within (the coming/this?) year. Moreover, it built the capacity of 28 participants and encouraged 10 of them to run for local councils, two of which ran for parliamentary elections and three worked in electoral campaign teams. It has also managed through the simulation game of “Magadif” to shift the perceptions of 100 local officials and youths regarding the importance of networking. In addition, the cross-sectoral local initiatives helped address environmental, educational, health, economic and social change-related challenges. 

Finally, the project outcomes of Y-lead stood the test of sustainability through the simulation games designed, the policy papers created, the cross-sectoral partnerships developed, the initiatives planned and the roundtables and forums which were deemed sustainable by participants. These outcomes are seen to have long term impact in the upcoming period, and is all the more reason to anticipate phase 2 of the project. 

Please click here to see the full external evaluation report