A directory has been launched by Pakati to showcase the work being done by youth-led and youth-serving organisations across Africa. The directory, which was developed by the African Leadership Institute with grant funding from the Ford Foundation, will assist African NGO's be recognised and found.
The directory serves several purposes. It aggregates and pools all of these NGO's on a single platform, making it straightforward for donors and funders to find them, as well as the audiences these organisations serve.
Additionally, youth-led and youth-serving organizations do not leverage lessons learnt by other similar organizations, as information-sharing opportunities are limited. This puts similar organisations within an email or phonecall of each other and enables them to find one another and learn from each other. This aligns with Pakati's goals of helping young people network and reach a critical mass in their respective areas.
The Youth Organisations Directory is fully searchable and allows organisations to create and update their own profiles. Typically, the biggest problem with directories is for visitors to obtain useful results from a search for a specific need or service. AFLI and its communications team devoted considerable development time both technically as well as liaising with the group assisting it on its collaboration portal to address what information is presented as well as how it's found. Organisations can be searched for by map, alphabetically, whether they are youth led, youth serving, or both, by country, focus areas, if it is a women's only NGO, or by plain text.
There are many young African leaders who have started organisations catering to the African youth market - the largest demographic segment on the continent - and is is underserved. AFLI's pan-African directory seeks to help these organisations, by making it easier for them to find each other to partner and network. The directory being developed is intended to be fully searchable, by country, area of need or expertise, and it will over time become a valuable resource for grant-givers, the organisations themselves, and people seeking assistance. Beta testing ran for several months with input and assistance from organisations helping to test the directory from across the continent. The directory went live on 20 August 2019.
In the two months since then, more than a hundred organisations have logged in and created entries for publishing on the directory. If you know of an organisation that could benefit from being listed, please ask them to create a directory entry. All the information on how to do so is at the Submit a Youth Organisation Listing page.
Note - when this article was written, the directory was on the Pakati subsite. This directory was migrated in July 2021 to a standalone site of its own at YouthForYouth.Africa
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