SMP Youth Committee

Learn what our ten Youth Committee Members have been up to...

The Youth Committee was launched during the 2018 Year of Young People, with the Scotland Malawi Partnership committing to an exciting new project involving ten young people from across Scotland with links to Malawi. This project is supported by the YOYP 2018 National Lottery fund and we'd like to thank players of the National Lottery for supporting our activities.

The role of the Youth Committee is to help us create, plan and coordinate a series of events and competitions and help promote and develop the historic links between young people here in Scotland and in Malawi.

The project, including the Youth Committee, was started in September 2018 and finished at the end of January 2020. The Youth Committee will continue to operate after the end of the project however, working with the SMP team to co-design our future work with young people. 

Find out more below about the activities, events, competitions and campaigns that have taken place as part of the project. 

What have we achieved?

Events

Over the course of the project, the Youth Committee have co-designed and led on a number of events run by the SMP. These include the 2019 Youth Congress and the School Partnership Awards, as well as both our 2018 and 2019 AGMs. 

Co-design with the Youth Committee has been a core part of all the events run for young people over the course of this project. The Committee has been involved in all parts of the organisation from designing the programmes, choosing speakers and facilitators, to building evaluations and reflecting on what they could do better next time. 

School Partnership Awards 2019

Scotland Malawi Partnership Youth Congress 2019

Penicuik High School's Malawi Day

Competitions

 During 2019, the Youth Committee ran a competition for three lucky groups to win £500 and support from the Youth Committee and SMP team to put on an event celebrating their link to Malawi. 

Our lucky winners were the Ninewells Community Garden and Dundee University Medical Students Group, Beath High School and St Roch's Secondary School who all then hosted fantastic events, celebrating their links to Malawi and spreading the word in their local communities of their work. 

New garden celebrates Scotland and Malawi links

Beath High School host Malawi celebration lunch

St Roch's Secondary School Malawi Day

Workshops

Over the second half of the project, the Youth Committee were involved with the design and delivery of workshops delivered in 8 schools across Scotland looking at the heritage and shared culture of the link between Scotland and Malawi. 

The first set of workshops were co-designed with the team from the David Livingstone Trust Birthplace Project. This workshop looked at the imagery used to tell the story of David Livingstone's journeys through Southern Africa in the 1800s and then linked this to the idea of how social media is used today to tell the story of our links to Malawi.

The second set of workshops looked at the cultural links between schools in Scotland and Malawi, asking schools to share poems in their first languages and to spend time learning these with a tutor.