Supporting Civil Visibility and Public Engagement in Mogadishu

Veynuus was engaged by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, with financial support from IOM, to provide strategic guidance, coordination support and post-event reporting for a public engagement initiative in Mogadishu. The work covered the agenda for the day, the theme for the year, the identification of speakers and panels, and the design of sessions that would hold together an audience drawn from ministries, international agencies, private companies, civil society and youth-led organisations. It closed with a written report and a set of policy recommendations.

The convening problem was the substance of the engagement. Private sector representatives, international NGOs, government officials and youth organisations came with different expectations of what the day was for. A ministry wants a public occasion that reflects institutional standing. An international agency wants evidence that its support produced engagement it can report. Youth organisations want to be heard rather than acknowledged. Private companies want to know why they are in the room. Designing a single programme that serves all of these without becoming a sequence of disconnected addresses is genuinely difficult.

The tension between youth participation and institutional gravitas is the sharpest version of this. Events that open the floor without structure produce noise and leave officials with nothing they can act on. Events that keep the structure tight produce a well-run occasion at which young people are present rather than participating. Both outcomes are common, and both are usually decided at the design stage rather than on the day.

There was also the question of what happened afterwards. A public engagement day generates a large amount of material, most of which evaporates within a week unless someone has been tasked with capturing it. Without a report, the ministry would be left with a successful event and no record of what was said in it, which is the point at which convening stops translating into policy.

Veynuus worked across the full event lifecycle, from initial planning through to post-event reporting, rather than joining at the delivery stage. Strategic planning and agenda shaping came first, aligning the day with global priorities while keeping it grounded in the Somali context. That alignment is not decorative: it is what allows a national event to speak to international partners in terms they already work with, without importing an agenda that does not fit local conditions.

Stakeholder and youth engagement was handled as preparation rather than as invitation management. Understanding what each participating group expected to get from the day made it possible to build those expectations into the programme, so that the private sector had a reason to stay past the opening remarks and youth organisations knew in advance where their contribution would sit.

Speakers and panellists were curated for balance of perspective rather than seniority alone. A panel assembled purely by rank tends to agree with itself, which produces a comfortable session and no insight. The team selected contributors who would put different positions and then designed the sessions so those differences were aired productively.

Sessions for direct youth expression were built into the structure rather than appended to it. The design intent was that young people would speak to the room on their own terms, at a point in the programme where the officials who needed to hear them were still present, and with enough framing that what they said could be recorded and acted on rather than simply applauded.

Delivery ran from planning documents through to a final report. The agenda was shaped in consultation with the ministry and refined as speakers were confirmed, with the year's theme carried through the session structure rather than announced and then set aside. Stakeholder engagement work secured participation across more than five ministries and agencies, with three sector groups represented in the room and over one hundred youth participants engaged.

Speaker curation involved identifying, approaching and briefing contributors so that each arrived knowing what their session was for. The youth dialogue sessions were facilitated to the design agreed in planning, which in practice means holding the format when a programme runs late and the temptation is to compress the participatory element first.

Post-event reporting was treated as a deliverable in its own right. The team captured what was said across sessions, identified the recurring themes and the gaps, and produced a comprehensive final report with a set of policy recommendations attached to it. That document was the mechanism by which the day's discussion left the room.

The engagement brought more than five ministries and agencies into the same conversation, engaged over one hundred youth participants across three represented sector groups, and produced one comprehensive report carrying one set of policy recommendations.

The insights gathered informed recommendations now being used to develop future youth events and skills strategies. By uniting different actors in one room, the ministry and its partners were able to map out future pathways for youth economic participation in both urban and rural contexts. The value was less in the day than in what the day made possible afterwards: a documented set of positions from groups that do not usually deliberate together.

Convening is a design discipline. Who is invited, in what order they speak, how long each group holds the floor and what happens to what they say all determine whether an event produces a record or an afternoon. Veynuus's work in this area is concentrated in the planning and the reporting, the parts that are invisible on the day and decisive afterwards.

It also shows how much of youth engagement is structural. Inclusion that is announced rather than designed tends to collapse under time pressure. Building participation into the programme, and defending it when the schedule slips, is what makes the difference between young people attending an event and shaping it.

• Strategic planning & agenda shaping
• Stakeholder engagement
• Speaker curation
• Youth dialogue design
• Post-event reporting