The Youth Agenda, Kenya’s leading advocacy organization, has today launched a voter mobilization campaign targeting the youth nationally.
The campaign is meant to sensitize them on the need to vote for presidential and gubernatorial candidates with the ‘youth agenda’ in mind.
This year’s campaign has been dubbed ‘Making the Youth Factor Count in 2017 Elections.’ The campaign will see all presidential and gubernatorial aspirants presented with sets of questionnaires from June 7 that they are expected to fill in and submit by June 15.
The questionnaires address various issues affecting the youth including: reducing unemployment, youth institutional and policy issues, affirmative action mechanisms, skills development, youth inclusion and participation, tackling mismanagement of sports and arts and ease of doing business amongst youth entrepreneurs among others.
The questionnaires for Gubernatorial Candidates are county specific putting into context dynamic youth challenges.
The questionnaires will then be collated and published into a voter’s guide on June 16th, 2017 that will be circulated to all the projected sixteen million youth voters nationally through social media and candidates forums.
Speaking during the campaign launch, political analyst and Youth Agenda Board of Directors, Chairperson, Mr. Javas Bigambo noted: “This is a big step for the youth in this country. We need to create a movement that will see to it that our agendas are catered for as part of our candidate’s manifestos so that we hold them accountable to it thereafter.
He added: “We need to work towards ensuring that youth agenda becomes top priority as we head towards the general election in August 8th, 2017 to reduce voter apathy in the country that will in turn translate into high turn out during the polls.”
Youth Agenda Chief Executive Officer, Ms Susan Mwongera noted: “The questionnaires will be accessed on the Youth Agenda website (www.youthagenda.org), sent to candidates through emails and also tagged to their twitter handle. We hope to get all responses from all presidential and gubernatorial candidates which will be a good boost for securing votes from the youth.”
This comes at a time when most of the presidential and gubernatorial aspirants have been cleared by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to vie for respective elective posts in the upcoming general election and political temperatures are at an all time high.
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