Mobdiun – Tunisia

Challenge:  How Might We Create a Scalable and Sustainable Model for Youth Development across Tunisia?

Mobdiun – Creative Youth is a social impact organization founded in 2016. Mobdiun, meaning ‘creatives’ in Arabic, inspires young girls and boys, living in marginalized communities where the Tunisian Revolution was sparked and are today at risk of violent extremism, to become the peaceful and creative change leaders of their communities Mobdiun uses arts, sports and technology in order to help amplify their voices and to contribute to their social, economic and political inclusion.

In its short-term strategy, Mobdiun proposes to implement a comprehensive pilot project in Kram Ouest in order to serve the 9.000 teenagers aged 10 – 19 who live in the area. In its longer-term strategy, Mobdiun wants to scale to similar at-risk working-class neighborhoods and potentially impact 500.000 young people from the same age group.

Mobidun staff will be leading teens through a four-month Leadership Academy workshop where they will learn the basics of human centered design and will run a design challenge around youth and civic engagement. Youth teams will create civic action groups and will explore, reframe, generate and prototype solutions to problems that they encounter on a daily basis. By creating solutions for their after school programs at the Mobdiun Youth House, teens will actively participate in positive leadership and learn valuable skills around project management and creating deliverables.

Columbia students will work with Mobdiun from January-May 2020 on Youth oriented policy in marginalized neighborhoods, Creating a guiding framework and a “manual” procedure for the youth centers that formalizes and standardizes the best practices for the youth; ie, welcome procedure in the youth houses located in marginalized neighborhoods, services that should be offered depending on youth situations, the best practices and benchmarks of the policies and procedures of advanced countries. This will be a direct continuation of the Fall Leadership Academy project. One goal will be to convince the Ministry of Youth to endorse this project, supervise it, and commit to adopt it in a newly elected government. Students will create a prototype national public policy for youth in critically underserved areas.