African Alliance YMCA (AAYMCA) teams up with DK&A London to address climate impact with youth empowered programme - the ‘Climate Games’.
The Climate Games offers a solution to help empower vulnerable and at-risk youth to take climate action through interactive game design. The programme is part of a wider ambition of the AAYMCA to create innovative leadership for young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, in addition to improving climate action and literacy in pan-African communities.
Research presented by AAYMCA shows that Climate Change has a significantly higher economic impact on young people in Africa, greatly affecting their health and wellbeing. Studies show a heightened risk of poor health, psychological distress, and disrupted schooling, leading to more young people at risk of coming into conflict with the law.
The Climate Games will begin with a cohort of 36 young AAYMCA Game Design leaders from 5 National Movement countries across Africa. Selected leaders will include representation of 50% women who will be offered training and support in Design Thinking and game-based interventions.
Interactive Game design and gamification techniques will be introduced to participants to successfully mobilise community action, improve climate literacy and accumulate evidence for policy interventions that improve young people’s resilience to the negative effects of climate change.
Upon completion of their training, Game Design leaders will harness their newly acquired skills to train the next cohort of participants on the real-world challenge of climate action. The programme is estimated to reach 12,000 young participants over the next 3 years.
The AAYMCA has built the YMCA Africa Renaissance Hub - a central network designed for young innovators to learn new skills and apply them in a vocational setting. The hub will host The Climate Games programme across 10 community PlaySpaces, with interactive games for the wider community, designed to address climate change adaptation for at-risk youth.
The DK&A team have been appointed as AAYMCA’s independent expert and innovation partner. DK&A will work with AAYMCA to support and improve their innovation management skills while co-designing plans to ensure strong, sustainable, and self-reliant delivery.
The AAYMCA and DK&A want to ensure the delivery of a course that will empower young people with new skills and futures, enabling them to become ambassadors within their community and support them in innovating adaptive strategies for climate action.
In addition to addressing climate action head-on, the Climate Game participants will be offered the opportunity to test and bring their game to market. This will have the positive effect of generating income, setting them up with their own enterprises, connecting them with future employment, and greatly decreasing their risk of vulnerability in society.
