From February 25th till March 2nd 2024, a group of 20 young people met in Brussels to work on the Decolonise Long Term Advocacy Strategy. Based on the learnings from the advocacy training which took place in 2023 in Paris and the first attempts to start the advocacy work by developing the policy papers, the youth advocates now analysed the stakeholders and different institutions which they should focus on in order to bring the policy papers forward and influence policymakers.

The young people did a lot of homework and came to the Advocacy Lab with a lot of information they had researched online. They shared their findings with the other participants and used the Lab to further explore how they could put in practice an effective advocacy strategy around the 2 policy papers that were developed so far. One is addressing the issue of EU funding and the other one is the existing visa procedures.
One afternoon, a network event was organised, bringing together like-minded organisations, relevant institutions and other potential allies. After the keynote speech from Chafik Allal (ITECO), a fishbowl debate took place with the participation of some guest speakers but also with input from the participants who wanted to make their voices heard.

One of the highlights of the week was also the workshop on European decision making by Europahuis vzw and the visit to the European Parliament.

One of the participants interviewed Chafik Allal after his intervention in the networking event. You could watch the interview here: