Between 2022 and 2024, AfricTivistes established the first three AfricTivistes CitizenLabs in Mauritania, Benin and Madagascar.  Since then, they have equipped 40 change-makers across four new countries: Chad, Cameroon, Guinea and Senegal.

From Chad to Senegal, via Cameroon and Guinea, AfricTivistes led an intensive training programme combining theory and practice, designed to strengthen the civic engagement of African youth through civic participation and civic tech.

This training series is part of our CitizenLab programme, which is an acceleration laboratory for youth engagement, particularly through digital tools and was launched in 2022.

Between 18 and 29 August 2025, the AfricTivistes team facilitated a series of workshops  on key themes in Chad and Cameroon. The sessions covered:

• Civic leadership and leadership within civic spaces
  
• Cybersecurity and personal data protection
  
• Designing and managing digital campaigns
  
• Civic innovation as a lever for participation
  
• Digital advocacy, and more.
  

From 8 to 26 September 2025, participants in Guinea and Senegal also benefited from practical sessions on developing digital tools in response to  civic challenges.

This capacity-building series draws inspiration from the AfricTivistes methodology on citizen participation, which is available to download for free from the AfricTivistes Methodological and Pedagogical Toolkit.

These training sessions enabled 70 changemakers from across the continent to understand the dynamics of civic participation in an African context, develop their skills and realise their innovative potential through active engagement. Participants gained a clearer understanding of their role as active citizens and explored practical ways to turn ideas into action.

The CitizenLabs in Senegal and Guinea, focused on civic technologies, serve as the operational arms for designing digital solutions. Their mission is to create, develop and deploy innovative technological tools that promote civic participation within their own countries and across the five other CitizenLabs (Mauritania, Benin, Chad, Cameroon and Madagascar). These two laboratories play a pivotal role in advancing participatory democracy across the continent through technology. 

The other five CitizenLabs are responsible for facilitating civic participation in their respective countries by creating content, building capacity and engaging in digital advocacy.

During these sessions, members of the AfricTivistes CitizenLab network explored their collective strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to refine their vision, establish priorities and develop locally tailored action strategies based on their theory of change.

Through this marathon of theory and practice, AfricTivistes reaffirms its commitment to equipping young African leaders with digital knowledge and tools for civic participation. This approach reflects a broader ambition: to establish a pan-African network of engaged young people.

Through the AfricTivistes CitizenLab project, the organisation demonstrates its conviction that African democracy is shaped by young people—the driving force behind a more inclusive and participatory future.

These activities form part of the Digitalise Youth project, which is a component of the Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI). The project aims to promote youth civic engagement, foster innovation and develop technological solutions. It also seeks to strengthen the digital resilience of young activists across 14 countries on the continent.