Date: 22-23 June, 2024
Location: GIA Tower, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
The Social Lab is a program of USAID Cambodia Advancing Youth Leadership project that funded by USAID Cambodia.
VBNK role in the Social Lab is to coordinate and facilitate the Social Lab Convening Moments (CMs) at the local level for the AYL project. Each Convening Moment is anticipated to be attended by around 45 youth and 10-parent staff (a total of 55 participants). Youth will be between 15-29 years and come from a diverse range of backgrounds.
The Social Lab is an approach to address complex social challenges by bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders to collaborate on designing and testing solutions to local issues.
Program Objectives:
Develop youths’ leadership and practical action skills
Enhance youth civic engagement and participation in community development
From 22-23 June 2024 the project conducted Convening Momen 2 to:
Reflection: Reflect on exploration, sharing learnings, and turning insights into a development hypothesis. This helps to develop informed strategies and approaches based on what is already working and what is not.
Planning: Design strategy, approach and work plan to test solutions. These should be small-scale interventions or prototypes to tackle aspects of the problem designed for learning.
Youth-led Community Project Support: Each team to be provided with a small grant of $500 to allow for experimentation and prototyping.
The participants are youth that come from Chemonics partners such as, Glean Asia, API, Future Forum and ODC, in total there were 55 participants (Females 32) attended this CMs.
Key Observation:
Youths are active in participation among youth groups and brave to share ideas in plenary
youths have the opportunity work together and get to know each other and closer to each other among facilitators and participants
Most of youth have confidences and ability to identifies the root course of the problem, decision making solution and prepared small pilot project to do intervention in short time (2 months implementation) then will come for reflection in Convening Moment 3
Focal point from all partner staff is good take care and well organized with their youths and they will continue supporting and coaching youth to implement projects.
