(Offre en Anglais) UNFPA lance un appel à candidature pour une application de jeux sur smart phone aux jeunes عودة إلى الفرص

Basic Life Skills: The Application of Smart Phone Game to Support Youth

Background

UNFPA interventions with young people focus, in many Arab countries, on providing them with basic life skills (BLS), by employing modules of youth-to- youth approach. However, the training usually reaches out to a few thousands of youth, limiting by costs. This applies to Libya and Morocco.

In Libya, the conflict and security situation further limit wider outreach, where young women face more of a challenge in mobility as compared to young men.

Considering that most young people play mobile based games, and building on the widespread use of smart phones, mobile games stand as a practical tool to widely spread these skills. The development in technology allow the launch of a mobile based game, that is appealing and gives space for young people to interact with other players in the real world. Through the game, youth could work on developing their self-awareness and esteem, self-expression, through a system that does not hinder their own autonomy, but rather provide them with an enabling environment.

These games should in optimal situation contribute to increasing awareness of the youth and their families on key UNFPA areas of concerns such as protecting youth of STI, GBV prevention, and women and youth rights. It is planned to reach around 2 million young people within a period of one year program.

Please refer to Annex 1 – detailed project document

As such UNFPA Libya CO will initiate the project of outsource a company to support the implementation of the project.

Objective:

Contribute to youth engagement and participation considering through the development and application of a smart phone game.

Key tasks of the company:

• Develop a smart phone game that can be characterized as follows : a) easy to be applied , b) free of charge or of a minimal cost, c) supports youth and women empowerment, personal development and protection, d) appealing to youth
• Technically, the company should undertake the following steps:

1. Requirements Analysis, Modeling and Specification
2. UX (User Experience) Mockups Design, taking into consideration different screen ratios and sizes 
3.  UI (User Interface) Design, taking into account screen resolutions
4. Development (Mobile app building)
5. Development of back-end and a dashboard
6. Testing and stabilization
7. Distribution in Google play and App Store
8. Development a go-to- market strategy

• Lead an awareness raising campaign on the game using all means including social media, and if possible TV
• Follow up with UNFPA on the progress of the project

Consultancy outcome :

• A gamified youth friendly mobile application that corresponds to the above mentioned features

• A Progress and final reports

Time Frame :

• Conception of the game ( January – April 2017)
• Development of the game ( May –August 2017)
• Communication strategy to promote the game ( September –October 2017)
• Launching the game ( June – December 2017)
• Reporting : Progress report April, June and September 2017
• Final Report December 2017

Libya is currently torn by conflict. Adolescents and youth in Libya are considered both the fuel of the conflict as well as the most affected sector of the population.

Though data is scarce, many Libyan experts, young Libyans workshops and focus group discussions, established the following observations concerning Libyan adolescents and youth:

• Many of them belong to families that are either displaced or getting impoverished due to the lack of currency and income.
• Experience a weak educational system with increased school drop-out rates among both girls and boys, but more so for girls, which deprive adolescents and youth of one of the social spaces to nurture their development and growth.
• Lack a social space for participation and personal growth
• Experience a violent environment, domestic violence, peer violence and sexual exploitation (mainly among conflict affected populations)
• Subject to a systematic attraction by the means and opportunities offered by extremists groups, like weapons, money, etc., which provide adolescents and youth with a feeling of power and self-worth.
• Access weapons easily, leading them into immediate violent and armed reactions in personal conflicts, which affect their psychosocial.
• Need of more secure spaces for youth, especially young women, in the social and political spheres

Most educational and development theories agree that adolescents and youth need to acquire BLS. This concept is built on the basic notion that adolescents who have developed a sense of self awareness and self- esteem are more likely to lead a successful life and to better adapt and show a higher level of resilience when their life conditions change.

For this purpose, UNFPA has developed modules to equip youth with the kind of skills, knowledge and information that they need today and in the future. This type of learning is designed to complement the formal education process, by providing individuals with an opportunity for self-exploration and learning. Through this type of non-conventional learning process, UNFPA ensures that young people discover their strengths and potential, and become more active, responsible members of their communities. They learn problem-solving and critical thinking, communication skills, teamwork, leadership initiatives, and civic participation. The modules employ usually a youth-to- youth approach with a concentration on self-development. The use of the manuals and the peer to peer training based on which, are usually linked with supporting joint youth actions and activities that promote social cohesion and resilience in host communities. They serve as a helpful tool to promote the role of youth participation and their self-empowerment in Libya and the region.

However, BLS usually faces the challenge of the costs that limit the outreach in numbers and geographic coverage.

Moreover, in Libya, the conflict and security situation further limit wider outreach, especially due to young women limited mobility compared to young men.

But it was noted that 2 million young people in Libya are LIBYANA (mobile company) subscribers or young people with Smart phones (mobile applications), which allows a wider outreach through the new media.

Vision and Mission:

The project aims at improving the skills social participation and inclusion of youth through creating a friendly youth virtual environment that enables them to exchange knowledge and experience and expresses their opinion in a culturally sensitive manner through modern technologies; smart phones, and social media.

Innovation:

The developers’ proposal will include a research of the sector, and check of the existence of any projects that can benefit the development of the game. They are already engaged in developing games that focus on education and information. The innovative factor that this game involves is the fact that it addresses learning skills and translating them into behaviors, which sets a challenge to the game development process and to the checks on the impact of playing this game on the players; hence, the need for a level of human interaction at intervals of the game.

It is in the final end a mobile game that is using all the new media, technology, developing software and relying on open sources. It is easy to closely link it to a monitoring system that collects and analyses information.

The privacy of individual players information will be secured through a close monitoring system that allows players to keep unanimous in relation to personal information.

Objectives and Approaches:

Goal:

To enable Libyan youth to develop their self awareness and esteem, self expression, through a system that does not hinder own autonomy, but rather provide them with an enabling

Objectives:

Indicators:

• The number of download of the Smartphone game ( at least 50 .000 download)
• Average time spent : 1 hour per day
• Retention Rate : 2 months
• Active users : 50 % of number of subscriptions
• User experience/happiness : 80% among active users like the game
• Social shares : 40% of active users share the application through social media

Action plan:

This action plan is being prepared based on the security condition in libya. Alternatively, the implementation should be held in Tunis with the total coordination with UNFPA office. The project overall implementation period is one year. In brief, the implementation of the project will be through the following 3 stages:

• Conduct an Inception phase with the participation of several stockholder and young girls and boys to achieve a complete conception of the Smartphone game
• Develop and issue a final prototype of the Smartphone game ready to be launched
• Promote and share the Smartphone game, within game young active users

Timeline, Milestones and Targets:

Tentative action plan, with timelines and milestones, is as follows:

(Q = 3 months)

Strategic Considerations:

UNFPA’s internal strategic interest is as follows:

• Empower young people, especially young girls and women and build their life skills
• Help young people, especially young girls, to Acquire Basic Life Skills, which are the psychosocial abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.

The project will be implemented based on the guiding principles of neutrality, sustainability, accessibility and youth empowerment with do no harm principles. Please refer to Annex 1 which illustrates the guiding principles of this project.

Organizational Capability:

The development of the game will be done through a concept development phase which involves life skill experts and computer game developers working together to develop the concept of the game, and its different components, and a game development phase where the game development experts will work on developing the game. The last phase is a promotion phase, where the game will start be played in Libya and the peer educators will be prepared to engage in the physical interaction part of the game. Meanwhile, the youth programme team in UNFPA Libya country office will be developing the monitoring system that allows to capture the level of learning and the impact of the game on the players.

The success of the game in meeting the objectives is conditional on the expertise of the youth staff, the skills of the developers, and the commitment of the peer educators that are facilitating the physical interaction. The youth team can manage the task successfully with a BLS expert, the developers will manage a couple of Hackathons with young developers who would provide their ideas, and the facilitators will be well trained by both youth team and the game developers.

As for the monitoring system, it is going to be developed through an experiential process that involves close monitoring of the games played and players involved.

Dissemination and Utilizing of Knowledge:

Again big data will be used as the art of extracting information and generating knowledge from various and voluminous data. When it comes to analyzing social media, Big data capability is almost mandatory. In this project, a group of peer educators from different countries in the region, including Morocco, will work on assessing playing, engagement in real interaction, and discovering young people’s information, practices and attitudes, on social media and real interaction, among Moroccan / Libyan youth.

Four techniques of Data analytics will be used; these include:

• Textmining: Study Term frequencies and term co-occurrences in collected tweets, Facebook posts and Youtube videos.
• Opinion mining: Automatically classify comments and tweets as negative or positive according to content.
• Network Analysis: Process twitter data to identify influencers in youth skills and practices, and generate an output file of relationships between their twitter accounts
• Geolocation: Overlay data on a map to identify regions/locations from where thematic tweets/ Facebook posts are published.

Data sources used are: Public Facebook Data, Twitter Data, and You-tube Data

Annex 1: Guiding Principles

The project will be implemented based on the following guiding principles:

• National ownership: As it is crucial to any development process, national ownership should be secured from the planning to the final implementation. Participation of all state and non-state actors including MOSA and local NGOs at national, regional and local level is considered to increase this national ownership.
• National capacity utilization and development: It is not only important to ensure national ownership but also to develop the required capacities of the national actors and institutions including NGOS and young people for the planning, leadership, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of the project . AS such representative of these entities and people will participate in planning, follow up in the implementation and the launch of the project.
• Community-centred approach: Engaging local communities and NGOs in the selection of the young people and follow-up on the project implementation and sharing the findings will lead to better sustainability of such interventions, as it was developed based on people’s needs and priorities, their engagement and participation.
• Conflict prevention and risk reduction: Regaining life normalcy and enjoying the chance of “building better” will be a basic principle. Increasing understanding and mutual acceptance among the participants is key in the project planning and implementation.
• Promoting gender equality: Young women’s empowerment and equality is a key value in the project: it has to be tackled from the initial stages of preparing this proposal and during the project implementation.
• Transparency and accountability: UNFPA will promote accountability and transparency in all project preparation and implementation stages. meaningful engagement and participation of all concerned stakeholders, at national, regional and local level, be it state and non-state actors, in all stages of the project. Proper financial and programmatic monitoring will be ensured.
• Coordination and building trust: UNFPA will engage civil society organizations and local entities to ensure the utmost participation of local stakeholders and the reflection of youth’s and women’s real needs and priorities.
• Building on existing development projects and networks in order to avoid duplication or weakening of functioning systems and mechanisms for cost effective interventions.
• Do No Harm: The humanitarian principle of DO NO HARM will also apply on this project as UNFPA will ensure that the project is conflict sensitive, engaging with all concerned actors, focusing on protecting minorities and mitigating any residual risks attached to women and youth empowerment.