27 Aug 2019

South Africa’s gold Youth Development Agency is the winner of the 2019 African Union (AU) Innovating Education in Africa Innovator’s award. Speaking during a press conference recentlyy, gold Youth Development Agency group chief executive officer, Ms Susannah Farr said she was excited that her agency’s Peer2Peer Systemic Scale Innovation won the 1st Place AU Education Innovation Prize of P500 000 (US$50 000).

She said their innovation was aimed at developing ten million young African leaders with character and integrity to mobilise their generation with knowledge and support to reach their full potential, with concrete results in social behavioural change, education and job creation.

Since its inception in 2004, she said, gold Youth’s focus had been to test and scale the methodology of youth peer education where positive youth pressure was structured to bring about sustained community change.

Peer2Peer, Ms Farr said was a blended training suite of resources and tools designed as a Do It Yourself product for scalability of the good practices associated with the gold Peer Education Model.

“It is available online, through the Teachable platforms, as a ‘Digital Peer Education How To’, with supporting guides and videos,” she said.

Of the over 300 submissions, from different countries that AU received for this year’s AU Innovating Education in Africa Expose, more than 40 were selected to present their innovations at the expose.

However, only 11 finalists were chosen to compete for the ultimate prize- won by the gold Youth Development Agency. Ends