Youth from Havana community (Katutura) started planning a Youth Café in a user-centered workshop on 9^th March 2016.  The workshop was facilitated by RLabs Namibia together with teams from Namibia University of Science and Technology and Aalto University, Finland. Altogether there were some 35 participants.

The Youth Café will be a place where the youth can meet, work on projects and where trainings can take place. RLabs organizes trainings on different media skills, such as photography and social media for the unemployed youth in informal settlements around southern Africa. In this workshop, the youth were planning the premises and the activities that should take place in the premises. The aim of the workshop was also to invent a way to earn some money for the café and thus make it financially self-sustainable.

Pietari Keskinen was one of the Aalto University people that were present in the workshop. “The youth brought up many good ideas about what they wanted to do in the café. The most wanted service for them seemed to be a computer lab” he says. “It seems that many of the younger members of community have already used computers in school, whereas the older people may lack the more basic skills. Just like in Finland!” Pietari explains.

The computers are needed for creating CV:s and such. Practically all of the community members own at least a feature phone, but the availability to the computers with capability to text editing are lacking. Many of the community members also hoped to receive some training in the computer usage.

The Youth Café project is run by RLabs Namibia, aiming at developing of an alternative model for livelihood creation for marginalized youth in Namibia, more info: http://rlabsnamibia.org

Project is funded by the embassy of Finland in Namibia.

This post was written by Pietari Keskinen