U-Report Jamaica School Tour
THE CHALLENGE
Increase sign ups to UNICEF’s youth polling platform - U-Report ahead of launch.
THE SOLUTION
Island-wide school tour with youth empowerment sessions and a fun team of youth to introduce students to the platform and sign them up on site.
With the success of the Talk Up Yout School Tour over the years, Talk Up Yout was well placed to partner with UNICEF to coordinate the U-Report School Tour. I joined the project as Project Manager - working with my team to select and work with schools to design the engagement sessions with each group of students, manage the cadre of young project assistants and keep the tour on track. I also worked closely with the UNICEF team and Talk Up Yout’s media production team to cover the tour through video, photography and produce influencer videos.
U-Report is a program designed to empower young people to speak out on issues that they care about in their communities, encourage citizen-led development and create positive change. At the time of launch, over 4 million young people across the globe were already “U-Reporters” using their voices and working as positive agents of change on behalf of the people in their country.
Ahead of each tour stop I spent time introducing project assistants, mostly selected from the Talk Up Yout youth community, to the platform and walking them through the sign up process. As Talk Up Yout alums they were familiar with the school tour format and brought a needed level of excitement and energy to the project that helped to attract students to the platform.
As usual for school tours I also spent time working with school administrators to introduce them to the platform as well and to understand issues affecting students at each school and the general level of student activism present, in order to tap in student leaders to help with sign ups.
At each school we set up sign up stations where students accessed the platform, tried it out and joined, after the engagement sessions led by Emprezz Golding. These sessions focused on riling up student energy, supporting them in recognizing the power of their voices, listening to them speaking up about issues, working with them to identify solutions and then driving home the benefits of U-Report in holding stakeholders in youth development accountable through hard data.
U-Report launched in May 2018 with more than 1000 young Jamaicans already signed up. Three years later the platform continues to grow and its data is being used to push for change on multiple issues, quickly send good information and resources out to young people and highlight youth voices locally.
