Final version: 22 July 2014 Supervisor: dr.ing. S.C.J. (Sander) Bakkes
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Youth Empowerment in Albania
through ICT: What are their needs?
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Michiel Dekker 10591494
Thesis Master Information Science - Human Centred Multimedia
University of Amsterdam Faculty of Science
Youth Empowerment in Albania through ICT:
What are their needs?
Master’s Thesis
Michiel Dekker
MSc Information Studies: Human Centered Multimedia Faculty of Science
University of Amsterdam The Netherlands
michiel.dekker2@student.uva.nl
ABSTRACT
Albania is one of the poorest countries of Europe but has an increasing amount of internet access. Expert in-terviews show that the youth of Albania are in need of self-advocacy and empowerment to ensure themselves of a better future. This study is part of an ongoing project for the development of an ICT platform that will con-tribute to the well-being and future prospective of the Albanian youth. In collaboration with the youth, in the form of focus groups, a prototype was developed for a platform for youth empowerment. With this prototype a suggestion is made for an online platform, illustrat-ing what the needs are of the Albanian youth and what such a platform should look like. The prototype was evaluated with five World Vision Albania employees, five youth and two focus groups. All evaluations show that the prototype correctly answers the user needs of the Albanian youth.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4 [Computers and Society]: General
General Terms
Design, Human Factors
Keywords
Youth empowerment, ICT, Albania, development, youth
1. INTRODUCTION
The population of Albania is relatively young, as roughly half of the population is under the age of 30 and the mean age is around 32 [9, 12]. Albania is faced with corruption and is also one of the poorest countries of Europe due to the economic collapse during the transi-tion from communism to capitalism in the 1990s [4,11]. In Albania, youth unemployment is an issue, as 31.3% of the youth in the age category of 15-29 is unemployed, compared to 17.7% of the overall population. Although the youth seems eager to improve their country, a study done with Albanians until the age of 17 shows that most
participants (58%) believe that their opinion is not con-sidered by local government [5].
As almost all youth in Albania has access to computers and internet [3], World Vision Albania1(WVA) is
look-ing to develop an information and communication tech-nology (ICT) platform which empowers youth in order to improve their future prospects as this allows WVA to reach more youth than they currently do through their existing program. The goals of this study are to deter-mine what the needs are of the youth in terms of such an ICT platform and to create a prototype for a platform that may provide in these needs in order to determine what such a platform should look like. Therefore, the research questions that will be addressed in this study are: 1) What are the needs of the Albanian youth in terms of an ICT platform for youth empowerment? 2) What should an ICT platform for the empowerment of Albanian youth look like? For purpose of a scope, youth are defined as people in the age category from 14 to 24. The research questions were approached by gathering the users’ needs and by co-creating a prototype with the youth of Albania by means of focus groups. The prototype illustrates what the platform should look like. Also, expert interviews were held with sta↵ of World Vi-sion to gain information about the youths’ needs from a di↵erent perspective than from the youth themselves. Additionally, the expert interviews were used to evalu-ate the prototype. After the prototype was completed, two focus groups and interviews with five youths were conducted to confirm whether the prototype does in-deed answer the needs of the youth of Albania and whether the youth understood how the platform would conceptually work.
The section related work (section 2) will provide a bet-ter understanding of the theoretical background. The methods section (section 3) will explain the methods
that were used for the study. The results of the study and design choices made will be discussed in the results section (section 4). The report will be concluded by a discussions section (section 5) and a conclusion and recommendations for future work in the conclusions sec-tion (secsec-tion 6).
2. RELATED WORK
In this section, some context will be provided about Albanian youth and ICT. Subsequently co-development will briefly be discussed, followed by a section about existing platforms.
2.1 Albanian Youth and ICT
In Albania, internet is becoming increasingly widespread. Internet usage has increased from 18.5% in 2007 to 54.7% in 2012 and 99.5% in 2014 [3,6,7] . According to a study which was conducted for UNICEF, 90% of the respondents had a social media account [1]. Also, most children used the internet at least once a day. Some were in constant contact with the internet through their mobile phones. However, according to this study, inter-net is mostly used for social media and entertainment (e.g. YouTube). Although one might expect an in-crease in internet usage to also lead to more civil so-ciety activism, this does not seem to be the case [8]. Only few non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have a Facebook profile and those are hardly used as ways of mobilizing the general public toward a specific goal. Albanian youth mostly use Facebook, Google and YouTube, and do not seem to know many other platforms, such as Yahoo! Answers, Dropbox and Google Drive [3]. The same study finds that about half of the youth have ac-cess to internet on their mobile phones and that 19% of the youth have no other way to use the internet.
2.2 Co-development
For this study a co-development, living labs-like ap-proach was chosen. Living labs are a way of developing innovation by involving the stakeholders in the process of designing new products [2]. The idea is that the user often already understands what he or she needs, with the result that innovation usually lies more with the end-user than with the developer. Eriksson writes: “The process of conveying the needs [of the user] to the developer is a complex, often trial and error like, pro-cess were the developer responds with concept models or prototypes to solve the needs until the user is sufficiently satisfied.” [2, p. 3]. By involving the user in the pro-cess of designing the final product, design choices can be made that are based directly on the needs of the users at an early stage.
2.3 Existing Platforms
Often programs for youth empowerment employ some form of photography, videos, digital story telling and
similar forms of multimedia as ICTs for youth empow-erment [10,13]. In all cases, these projects require a) an adult facilitator, b) some form of training for the par-ticipating youth and c) the supply of equipment, such as cameras and sound/video/image editing equipment. WVA indicated that they want to reach youth outside their direct programs in the future, as the youth in their programs are already being assisted. As these methods of youth empowerment are not easily scalable, they are less suitable for the ICT platform under consideration. As will be described later on, a section for publishing stories (i.e. a blog) and creative work have been incor-porated in the final prototype.
There are many websites and platforms for youth, es-pecially for providing them with information. These websites often o↵er content that is written by the or-ganisation behind the websites, rather than allowing users themselves to contribute. In its youth strategy and youth technical approach, WVA has formulated the following objective: “Youth are agents of change that contribute actively in social and economic life and ad-vocate for the most vulnerable” [14, p. 4]. Given this objective, platforms, which allow the users to engage with each other or the public with empowerment as a specific goal, are considered more in line with the ob-jective of this research. The following platforms are considered:
A platform for youth empowerment is Where is my Pub-lic Servant2(WIMPS). The platform is run for and by
young people in Ireland, o↵ers a place for discussion and tries to bring youth into contact with government representatives by allowing youth to start a campaign on the website and by facilitating e-mail conversations. Although putting Albanian youth into direct contact with public servants may be difficult, due to the politi-cal climate and poor government facilities, creating the framework for allowing youth to raise issues by starting campaigns is an interesting approach.
Voices of Youth3 is a platform which was created by UNICEF4. Voices of Youth is the “online place for young
people to learn more about issues a↵ecting their world”. The platform allows users, with a focus on youth and children, from across the world to publish and discuss stories on a selection of topics provided on the web-site. Also, debate topics are posted weekly which allow for discussion. Stories can be submitted by anyone, but they are monitored, and sometimes edited for grammar, by the platform’s sta↵.
3. METHODS
The methods section consists of four parts. First the approach of the study will be discussed. This is followed
2
http://wimps.tv
3http://voicesofyouth.org 4http://unicef.org
by an explanation of the focus groups. The third part gives an explanation of the expert interviews and the final part explains about the validation interviews.
3.1 Approach
A living labs-like approach was used for this research. By using this approach, both research questions (i.e. What are the user needs? And, what should an ICT platform in this context look like?) can be answered. The result of this approach is a prototype which was built in collaboration with the youth.
The study commenced with three focus groups to gather the users’ needs, followed by a period for developing the prototype based on these needs. Two focus groups were then held for making more detailed design choices and for evaluating the prototype. Expert interviews were held with World Vision sta↵ with the goal to gain ad-ditional insights from a di↵erent perspective than that of the youths themselves for the design and evaluation of the prototype. The expert interviews were held in concurrence with the focus groups. Finally, validation interviews were conducted with five youth to evaluate the prototype and determine whether the research ques-tions could be answered with the prototype that had been developed.
3.2 Focus Groups
To achieve user co-development, interviews and focus group sessions were organised within so-called ADPs (Area Development Programs) of World Vision in vari-ous parts of Albania. The focus groups had two goals: a) determine what the needs of the youth are and, in later focus groups, b) to validate the design choices that had been made.
A total of 41 participants consisting of 22 males and 19 females participated in the focus groups, with a mean of 8.2 participants per focus group (age µ = 16.0, s = 2.015, min = 12, max = 21). Although the target age group for the platform was 14 - 24, younger youths also participated in the focus groups. This was because the ADPs were responsible for inviting participants and the age restrictions were not always observed. In hindsight this did not make much di↵erence for the results. In fact, younger participants were generally more focussed, eager and engaged.
The focus groups were held in two rounds. The first round consisted of three focus groups, with whom the general needs of the youth were gathered. The sec-ond round, consisting of two focus groups, was used to gather information to specific sections of the plat-form and to validate the platplat-form. The majority of the platform was designed in the period between the two gatherings. The preparation of the prototype covered roughly four weeks.
3.2.1 First Focus Group Round
The focus groups in the first round were divided into three parts. The first part was an analysis of the prob-lems that the youth face in their environment by en-couraging the youth to mention all issues they and their peers face. The second was a brainstorm session in which the youth reflected on how they might address one of the problems described in the first section. The problem to be addressed was democratically selected by the participants. The third part of the focus group was a brainstorm session about how problems in the com-munity might be addressed using a platform. Also, sug-gestions were made for possible features of the platform by showing the youth existing platforms and asking for their feedback.
In the second and third focus group, examples of ex-isting platforms that were shown were WIMPS, Yahoo! Answers5, WikiHow6 and Voices of Youth. As the the
youth’s understanding of the internet appeared to be quite limited (most youth use only Facebook7, Google8
and YouTube9 [3]), it was difficult for them to imagine
how a platform might empower them to improve their current and future situation. Although it might intro-duce a bias when particular examples are presented, this did make the idea of a platform less abstract and al-lowed the youth to provide more appropriate feedback. Showing the existing platforms to the participants of the focus groups was a step that was added after the first focus group had met, as it became clear that par-ticipants had difficulty in providing feedback about us-ing internet tools as this seemed to be too abstract for them.
3.2.2 Second Focus Group Round
The focus groups in the second round were divided into two parts and had two goals. The first was to contribute to design choices on a specific section of the prototype and the second was to evaluate the prototype. The focus groups were divided into two parts.
The first part was an exercise in which the participants, in groups of two or three, had to think about how they would organise an event that would contribute to solv-ing a problem that the group had chosen from a se-lection of the more common problems described during the first focus group round. Participants were provided with several questions to answer after having discussed the event they wanted to organise. Examples of these questions are: “How would you communicate with oth-ers who organise the event?” and “How would you volve others in your event?” The aim was to gain in-sight into what the ‘Campaigns’ and ‘Events’ sections
5http://answers.yahoo.com 6http://wikihow.com 7 http://facebook.com 8http://google.com 9http://youtube.com
of the platform should look like, which will be further discussed in section 4.3.1.
The second part started with a plenary demonstration of the prototype. The participants were asked to each think of something they liked and something they did not like about the prototype. They were allowed to interrupt the demonstration in order to ask questions or make comments. After the demonstration the youth were individually asked what their positive and what their negative comments were. After this, the group was asked to contribute ideas for further improvement of the prototype.
3.3 Expert Interviews
Interviews were conducted with sta↵ of World Vision in concurrence with the second round of focus groups. The goal of these interviews was to gain an other per-spective on user needs. Although these individuals are not likely to partake directly on the ICT platform, they were able to contribute to the research as they are in regular contact with the youth, or were able to o↵er ex-pertise in other ways. Also, it is important to not only look at how the youth see their environment, but also how they are perceived by it.
World Vision has indicated that local authorities are normally reluctant to participate in such studies, mak-ing it difficult to arrange interviews which were also unlikely to yield much useful information. Therefore, local authorities were not interviewed. Also, interview-ing sta↵ of schools proved difficult to organise. Hence, only World Vision sta↵ was interviewed.
In the ADPs, three World Vision sta↵ members were in-terviewed. These sta↵ have tasks that bring them into frequent contact with communities, community institu-tions and social networks as they monitor children who benefit from the projects of World Vision. They there-fore have a good idea of what youth are experiencing. At the national office, one of the sta↵ members from the IT department was interviewed. Although his job does not involve children, he indicated to work with the youth of his church. The goal of interviewing someone from the IT department was to gain more insight from someone who has some knowledge of the ICT situation of the country and therefore able to contribute to trans-lating the youths’ needs to ICT solutions.
The fifth interview was held with the National Direc-tor of World Vision Albania. This interview was to understand how the platform might contribute to the strategic goals of World Vision Albania. These strate-gic goals are tailored to help improve the situation of the country’s children and youth.
All interviews were semi-structured and were conducted
with the same protocol, with exception of the inter-view with the National Director of World Vision Alba-nia. This is due to his role within the organisation and the information that was expected to be gathered from this interview. The interview consisted of several gen-eral questions about the needs of the Albanian youth, a demonstration of the prototype and the question what the interviewee thought the strengths and weaknesses of the prototype were. The questions for the National Director were formulated to gain insight into how the platform could be aligned with the strategic goals of World Vision and concluded with questions to evaluate the prototype after it was demonstrated. The evalua-tion quesevalua-tions allowed for triangulaevalua-tion of the results found for the validation interviews, which are described in section 3.4.
3.4 Validation Interviews
For the validation interviews, five youths were inter-viewed in a mix between a think aloud sessions and a semi-structured interview (age µ = 16.6, s = 1.94, min = 15, max = 20, 3 males, 2 females). The focus of the interviews was to validate that the prototype does indeed respond to the needs of the youth. Although all interviewees were from an urban area, the focus groups showed the youth to be homogeneous in their responses towards an ICT platform, regardless of gender or being from an urban or rural area. They were therefore re-garded as representative for the population of youths in ADPs.
The participants were asked to explore the platform one section at a time. When instructed to explore a sec-tion, the interviewee was asked to share any thoughts, questions or remarks out loud each time. After the par-ticipant had explored a section he or she was asked a few questions, mostly in the line of whether they would be interested in posting content to the section they had explored and receiving comments on their content, and whether they would be interested in reading/viewing other users’ content and posting comments. At the end they were asked about their general opinion about the platform, which part they liked the most or were most likely to use and if they had any points of improvement.
4. RESULTS
The results section discusses the findings of the study. The first part describes the findings from the first round of focus groups. This is followed by the results from the second round of focus groups are discussed. Subse-quently, the design of the prototype and related design choices are described. The final part provides the re-sults from the expert interviews and the last section describes the results from the validation interviews.
4.1 First Round of Focus Groups
Youth in Albania generally have very little experience with internet, often using only Facebook, Google and
Platform Response* DeviantART10 +++ Voices of Youth +++ WIMPS +++ Yahoo! Answers ++ Stack Exchange11 + -WikiHow -Doodle12 -*Scale from - - - to +++
Table 1: responses to existing platforms based on observation of the groups’ responses
YouTube. It was therefore difficult for youth to come up with solutions for the issues that they experience around them that might be o↵ered by a digital platform. In the first round of focus groups, the youth were pre-sented with existing platforms that might be of use to them in the context of this project to overcome the abstraction. Youth were positive about most of the platforms that were shown to them (see table 1) and wanted all of those that they were positive about in the platform, insisting that they would use them if made available in their own language. The responses to the di↵erent platforms made it possible to make a selection of useful features. The features were translated to the prototype, which is explained in section 4.3.
The majority of the information that was obtained from the first round of focus groups was about a) the prob-lems faced by the youth of Albania and b) the type of features that the youth would be interested to have in the platform. The issues faced by the youth were iden-tical across focus groups, with the exception of two area specific issues (one focus group’s area had an issue with potable water (Kor¸ca) and an other focus group men-tioned a problem with blood feuds in their area (Shko-dra)). The issues that were mentioned were gender imbalance (including arranged marriages for girls and selective abortion), youth gambling, youth using drugs, youth unemployment, littering and (air)pollution, qual-ity of education and the discrimination of ethnic minori-ties such as the Roma.
The first round of focus groups provided good insight into the problems faced by the youth. Unfortunately the youths were not able to imagine how these problems could be resolved using an ICT platform. Therefore, it became difficult to involve the youth directly in the development of the platform.
4.2 Second Round of Focus Groups
Given the youths’ limited scope of understanding with regards to the internet, a wizard-like approach was used
10
http://deviantart.com
11http://stackexchange.com 12http://doodle.com
for designing the prototype (this will be described in section 4.3). Information collected during the first round of focus groups was used as a guideline when designing the prototype in the time between the two rounds of focus groups. No design choices were made in direct collaboration with the youth.
The second round of focus groups was used to vali-date and receive feedback on the progress made in the time between the rounds of focus groups and to collect information specific to completing the campaigns and events sections, which are described in sections 4.3.1.2 and 4.3.1.3.
The final two focus groups did not yield many new in-sights, but the youth were able to confirm the planned course of action for the campaigns and events section. The reactions towards the platform were very positive and when asked for one positive and one negative aspect of the prototype most participants said they liked the whole platform and that they had no negative remarks. A few participants made remarks that they would like to be able to easily determine their privacy settings and report abusive content to the platform administrators. It is interesting to note that multiple participants in the second round of focus groups asked whether the plat-form was already available or when it would be available as they were keen to use it.
The second round of focus groups did not provide new insights for designing the platform. The response to the prototype was however positive, with several youths asking if they could already use the platform.
4.3 Prototype
The prototype, which has been made available on GitHub13, was co-developed with the youth that participated in the study, is a reflection of the needs of the youth in terms of a platform for youth empowerment and shows what the platform should look like. It thus provides an answer to both research questions. The prototype consists of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is there-fore static. Figure 1 is a screenshot of the starting page of the platform when a user is logged in. It displays the general feed of the platform, which is explained in section 4.3.2. This section describes what the proto-type consists of and some of the more important design choices that were made during its creation.
4.3.1 Sections
When designing the prototype, one of the goals was to maximize the ease of use to increase the platform’s adaptability. To contribute to this, a choice was made to divide the platform into silos. Each silo is a section of the platform with its own goal and set of features. The silos of the platform are: blog, campaigns, events,
Figure 1: Screenshot of the starting page of a logged in user
creativity, questions & answers and discussion. Apart from campaigns and events (events can be added to campaigns) the silos do not interact with each other in any way. This is believed to add to the simplicity of the platform. Silos will be referred to as sections [of the platform] in the rest of this report.
4.3.1.1 Blog
The blog is a section of the platform that allows youth to share stories about events that happen around them, opinions they have about their surroundings and thoughts they have about di↵erent topics in the form of (opin-ionated) articles and columns. It allows youth to bring perspective on their environment and to raise awareness about issues that they feel need attention. During the first round of focus groups, youth were shown Voices of Youth. Many youth were very interested in this form of storytelling. Some indicated that they felt it would help them to share their story about their community and raise awareness for di↵erent topics and that it would give them more confidence as a person when they are able to share their thoughts and receive feedback on their stories from peers.
As there was a strong indication that there was a need for this section of the platform, it has been added to the prototype. An issue, which has not been addressed in this study and still requires attention, is the man-ner in which articles are procured and moderated. The threshold for submitting articles should be kept low to stimulate contribution. However, to keep a blog inter-esting it requires some form of quality assurance, albeit from the community.
4.3.1.2 Campaigns
Campaigns can be initiated to advocate for a certain purpose (e.g. new furniture for the school) or social is-sue (e.g. gender inequality). A campaign should be able to have certain end goals and an end date, but can also be continuous. A campaign is used to inform interested people about the goals of the campaign and provide visitors of the campaign page with updates about the
campaign.
The prototype illustrates that users can create a peti-tion that visitors (not necessarily users of the platform) can sign. Another option, which was not explored, is to o↵er a crowdfunding option for the campaign. One of the interviewees in the validation interviews (which are described in section 4.5) described how money was col-lected from friends and relatives to fund medical treat-ment for a friend. O↵ering a crowdfunding option is something that needs to be carefully considered as it is not clear to what extent electronic fund transfers are possible in Albania.
Next to o↵ering means for external communication about a campaign and providing ways to engage others in a campaign, the platform also provides tools to the or-ganisers of a campaign to make the organisation easier, especially when distances between organisers need to be covered. For example, when the campaign is being or-ganised in an area where organisers live in villages that are more distant from each other or when a campaign is organised for the whole country. The prototype il-lustrates this with the possibility to share files and a discussions section for a campaign. The idea is that these tabs are only available to organisers of a cam-paign, allowing easy collaboration.
Users have the possibilities to add events to campaigns, which are created in the events section of the platform (see paragraph 4.3.1.3). Events can contribute towards a campaign’s goal (e.g. a day to pick up trash in a campaign against litter). Although this is not clearly illustrated in the prototype, the intention is that events that are organised by a group of people can be added to a campaign that is being organised by a completely di↵erent group. In this way, people can organise their own event to contribute to a campaign.
4.3.1.3 Events
The event section allows organisers of an event to com-municate information about an event to the public and it o↵ers the organisation tools which were described in paragraph 4.3.1.2 for campaigns. As described in the previous paragraph about campaigns, events can be added to a campaign to generate traffic to the event. This is to show the public to which goal the event is con-tributing and to allow updates which are posted in the event to show up on the feeds of users who are following the particular campaign. Note that it is not required to add an event to a campaign.
4.3.1.4 Creativity
During the first three focus groups, many youths in-dicated that they enjoy making creative works such as paintings, photographs and poems. When the art sharing website DeviantART was shown to them, many
youth responded enthusiastically. Although creative ex-pression will not directly improve employability, it can contribute to a sense of accomplishment and improve self-esteem. Also, being able to express their views in creative ways might o↵er opportunities for advocacy in a way that is appropriate for them.
4.3.1.5 Questions & Answers
Youth participating in the second and third focus group responded positively to a Yahoo! Answers, but they re-marked that they found it very important that they can ask questions about all sorts of topics. The rea-son a questions and answers section was pitched, was so that they have a platform for asking questions to help prepare for the future. Examples are asking for help with choices in education and help with writing a resume or advice for job seekers. Based on the re-sponse from the youth the choice was made to keep the categories for this section of the platform more general. Allowing youth to answer all sorts of questions is ex-pected to contribute towards an increased self-esteem. The categories selected for the prototype are the same categories used by Yahoo! Answers. When developing the platform the categories should be re-evaluated to reflect the needs of the Albanian youth.
The questions and answers section allows users to pose a question on the platform, allowing others to answer their questions. Users can then up- or downvote an an-swer. The person who asks the question can mark an answer as the best answer. The answers are then dis-played with the answer marked best first, followed by the rest of the answers, sorted in order of voting rank. Users can be motivated to respond to questions by re-ceiving points for answers, upvoted answers or answers marked as best answer, which all contribute to some form of a leader board or badges.
4.3.1.6 Discussion
The discussion section is simply a discussion forum. A di↵erence with many traditional forum systems is that discussion topics have been made easier to access. Often forums display a list of discussion categories first (e.g. the widely used phpBB14). Topics within those cate-gories are only displayed when the category of choice has been selected. The choice was made to display ac-tive topics (i.e. topics with recent activity) and recently started topics on the starting page of the discussion sec-tion of the platform. A user’s own recent discussions have been made visible to the user at all times.
The categories for discussions were copied from the ques-tions and answers section and were not determined in collaboration with the youth. These will also have to be re-evaluated to reflect the interests of the user.
14http://phpbb.com
For users it might be difficult to distinguish between a forum discussion and a question that needs an author-itative answer. Although “Who do you think will win the next elections?” is a question, it is probably better suited for the discussions section than for the answers section. A suitable way to deal with this subtle di↵er-ence is to use the same approach as the Apple discussion forums15. Here it is possible to mark a new topic as a
question, enabling the options of marking a response as the best answer and voting up other peoples’ responses. On the Apple discussion forum however, the order of the replies is not determined by votes, even when the topic is marked as a question. The reason the discus-sions section and the question and answers section were not merged in the prototype was to illustrate the need for both sections, even if they end up being merged into one section.
4.3.2 Facebook
Given that nine out of ten youth use the social network Facebook [3], the prototype was designed to create some analogies with Facebook. The main characteristic is that information from di↵erent parts of the platform is gathered in a feed. A feed is a list of updates from, in the case of Facebook, friends and organisations that the user follows. In the case of the platform, which allows a user to follow instances (such as a user or an event) but does not allow users to add each other as friends, it is a list of updates based on followed instances and previous actions by the users (e.g. asking a question in the Questions and Answers section of the platform). Figure 1 illustrates what the feed looks like. Some parts of the platform have their own feed, which acts as a filter on the general feed so that only updates that are relevant to that section of the platform are shown. Other elements that can be found in the prototype that are also seen in Facebook are the way posts (i.e. up-dates) are shown, the ability to post comments directly underneath a post and the ability to like a post (i.e clicking on a link that increments a counter of how many people appreciate the post).
In summary, the platform is designed with several sec-tions or silos which each o↵er their separate set of fea-tures. This is done to avoid complexity; to make the platform easier to learn and understand. Analogies with Facebook were created, as this will make the platform easier to understand for its intended users. The plat-form tries to achieve several avenues for empowerment, the most prominent being advocacy, expression, infor-mation sharing and enabling collaboration.
4.4 Expert Interviews
The main outcome from the interviews with the ADP and IT department sta↵ is that, at this moment,
banian youth mostly need an opportunity to advocacy and to be involved with decision making. What was interesting to note, is that the sta↵ members knew very little about ICT, often less than the youth for whom the prototype is being developed. For this reason it was dif-ficult to gain new insights into how the platform might contribute towards youth empowerment. After having received a demonstration of the platform the intervie-wees generally reacted positively to the platform, were thankful for the e↵ort being put into the platform, but were not able to o↵er constructive feedback regarding the prototype.
The goal of the interview with the National Director was to gain insight into how the platform can help reach the strategic goals of WVA. The National Director in-dicated that the current youth is the first post-Stalinist generation. The older generation is negative about “vol-unteering”, as in the Stalinist time this was a metaphor for forced labour. However, the current generation is willing to do anything that is purposeful towards im-proving their country. He states: “youth want to have the feeling that they play an important role in the devel-opment in their country.” He believes that if the youth are given a real possibility to make a di↵erence, this will have a great motivational potential.
When asked how the platform might contribute to the strategical goals of World Vision Albania, he referred to the strategic goal of making the youth “agents of change” as described in the national strategy [14]. He explained that his hopes for the platform are that it will get a national character which transcends the ADPs and that the platform becomes a self-perpetuating youth movement which is not dependent on World Vision. The expert interviews showed that self-advocacy for the youth should be seen as one of the more important goals of the platform. Youth are willing to contribute to the development of their country and are likely to do so if they receive the correct instruments. There was little contribution to the prototype itself from the expert in-terviews, but all interviewees responded positively to a demonstration of the prototype and indicated that they believed the platform will provide the youth with the tools necessary for improving their current and future situation.
4.5 Validation Interviews
All five youth were positive about the platform. They were confident that they would use the platform if it was available and that it would have added value for the youth of Albania. Two interviewees stated that they hoped the platform would be available soon and one interviewee stated she would probably use the platform more than Facebook, despite her using Facebook several times a day already.
Feedback received from almost all interviewees was that they want the ability to easily manage their privacy set-tings, allowing them to determine who can see what they posted. One interviewee also wanted the possibil-ity to post questions in the questions and answers sec-tions anonymously, as he knew people who might have questions to post, but who probably did not want others to know that they posted the question. Another inter-viewee said that she had often reported abusive content to Facebook and did not see any e↵ect.
From the validation interviews as well as the focus groups it seems that privacy and supervision are important to the youth. One interviewee stated that he thought it was important that active users can become part of the team behind the platform and that he was keen to do so himself.
In conclusion, the validation interviews showed that the prototype successfully reflects the needs of the youth. Although some concerns were mentioned, mainly about privacy, the youth responded positively towards the pro-totype.
5. DISCUSSION
In this section several issues concerning the platform are discussed and possible solutions to these issues are o↵ered. Finally, limitations of the study and the impli-cations of these limitations are mentioned.
5.1 Platform Administration and Privacy
Most youths indicated that they would be keen to use the platform once it is released. However, youth in all focus groups and the validation interviews also indi-cated that they were concerned about privacy and abu-sive content from other users. Allowing privacy settings should be a requirement for the platform. However, care must be taken that privacy settings do not go against the purpose of a feature of the platform. For example, it might be necessary to make public who has started a campaign or organised an event. As for the administra-tion of the platform, care must be taken that reported issues are seriously addressed. Youth need to be able to trust the platform for it to become successful. A possi-bility would be to recruit youth who are already part of World Vision’s program to volunteer as administrators of the platform.
5.2 Continuity of the Platform
The prototype was built with the current needs of the youth in mind. However, the needs might change iin the future. It is therefore important to ensure that the platform will receive continuous updates and improve-ments.
Also important is that the platform cannot remain un-der constant supervision of World Vision. This would require existing sta↵ to perform this task next to their
full-time jobs. It is therefore important to recruit a group of people who are willing to maintain the plat-form. Perhaps youth who are engaged can be identified for this purpose. Ideally an organisation for the main-tenance and moderation of the platform should be cre-ated. Youth can be recruited from ADPs in an early stage. As the platform gains more users, users of the platform can be involved.
5.3 Personal Development
In the expert interview with the National Director, he mentioned that he envisioned that the platform will pro-vide possibilities for the improvement of employability; that the platform, for example, would o↵er youth the opportunity to teach themselves certain skills (e.g. re-sume writing). However, the platform is designed as a communications platform for the youth of Albania to allow them to interact with each other.
Providing a page with tutorials for self-education was suggested but does not suit the interactive character of the platform. Also, there was too great a risk of the page becoming outdated and incomplete. A more logical step would be a knowledge base which is crowd-sourced in the form of a wiki. During the focus groups, the youth were shown WikiHow, and were asked about their views on the platform. Although most youths could see the added value of a how-to platform, they mostly responded quite neutrally or even slightly nega-tively. A possibility is to use the tools that the platform o↵ers to provide information to the users. An example might be World Vision sta↵ creating questions in the Q&A section of the platform and answer it themselves, providing links to relevant information and organisa-tions.
5.4 Mobile Compatibility
In Albania, about half of the youth uses internet on their mobile phones, with one in five youths only being able to use internet on their mobile phones [3]. Creating a mobile application or mobile version of the prototype was outside the scope of this study. However, given the large number of youths who use internet on their phones, many could be excluded from the platform if they are not taken into consideration. The prototype was designed to be responsive, meaning that the web-site resizes when viewed on a mobile screen. However, this does not always produce the ideal layout for the platform.
5.5 Study Limitations
As described in section 3.3, no interviews were con-ducted with (local) authorities. As the youth show that they have the need to raise issues or come into contact with (local) authorities and politicians, it would be in-teresting to further investigate the readiness of public servants to participate in such initiatives.
Another limitation is the fact that the sample for the focus groups is a sample of convenience. All children who participate in the research were part of a World Vision ADP. ADPs are development programs and its locations were selected based on the need for develop-ment programs. Also, youth who are part of an ADP might potentially be more informed, concerned and/or active than youth generally is in Albania. However, due to the depth of the focus groups, drawing valid conclu-sions is still believed possible.
A challenge for this research was the language barrier. WVA appointed a sta↵ member to assist with language barriers. However, she is not a trained interpreter but someone who speaks English and Albanian. Also, there was no Albanian speaking note taker during the focus group sessions and notes were limited to the English translations. This has often lead to information being lost during translation.
6. CONCLUSIONS
In this section this research is summarised and rec-ommendations are made for future development of the platform.
6.1 Conclusion
A prototype was created in collaboration with the youth of Albania. It was then evaluated in an interview with five youths. It was also evaluated in two focus groups with 16 youths in total. Although the youth will have additional needs and there are other ways to answer the needs of the youth in a platform, it has been demon-strated that the platform will o↵er the youth opportu-nities to improve their future and increase their social engagement, and that it is also likely to be adopted by them. Given that the platform was built in collabora-tion with the youth, with input from professionals who are involved with the youth and that the platform was evaluated it is also valid to say that the prototype re-flects the needs of the youth (research question 1) and that it provides a clear illustration of what the plat-form should look like when it is developed (research question 2). Therefore, the prototype and this report answer both research questions. However, one should note that the youth who were consulted formed a sam-ple of convenience as discussed in section 5.5.
6.2 Future Work
The largest task ahead is the development of the ac-tual platform. During this process it is important to continue the dialogue with the youth. It is important that the platform is built according to the needs of the youth and that suitable design choices are made accord-ingly. However, it is difficult for the youth of Albania to adequately conceptualise such a platform and the implications of di↵erent design choices. It is therefore advised that design choices are verified with the youth rather than making the choices with the youth.
It is important to determine how awareness of the ex-istence of the platform will be created. World Vision already organises activities with the youth involved in their programs. By making use of the platform to or-ganise these activities, encouraging the participants to make campaigns and events to support the activity, World Vision Albania has the potential to introduce many new users to the platform, creating word-of-mouth advertising. It could also be helpful to gain press cov-erage and to advertise the platform on Facebook, as Facebook is widely used. There are di↵erent ways to promote the platform and care must be taken that this is not forgotten, as a platform without users will not provide any benefits to the youth of Albania.
Most of the youth in Albania use Facebook. Currently, the only integration between Facebook and the proto-type are the Facebook login button and the share and like buttons for campaigns and events. The fact that Facebook is so widely used should be seen as an op-portunity. Therefore, the possibilities for further in-tegrating the platform with Facebook, for example by connecting events from the platform with public events in Facebook, should be explored. Also, Twitter integra-tion might be interesting. For example, hashtags could be generated for an event or a campaign. By encour-aging participants of an event or a campaign to post updates on Twitter using the hashtag associated with the event or campaign will allow for aggregation of up-dates from Twitter to the platform.
The youth platform WIMPS allows users to contact public servants through the platform. Reactions from public servants are then also handled through the plat-form, allowing the platform to show the response rate of di↵erent public servants. This shows youth which pub-lic servant is responsive and is therefore more likely to respond. It also encourages public servants to respond to strengthen their reputation. When shown this part of WIMPS, the participants of the second focus groups exclaimed that it is probably the best feature that such a platform could have, but that it would never work in Albania. Given that Albania is considered one the most corrupt countries of Europe [11], this is not a surprising response. Keeping this feature in mind for the future is interesting though, as the very presence of such a plat-form could be an element in improving this situation.
7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks go to Sander Bakkes and Frank Nack for their supervision and support in conducting this research on behalf of the University of Amsterdam. Gratitude is ex-pressed towards World Vision Albania for making avail-able their sta↵, expertise, time and resources. Special thanks go to Majlinda Karameta for coordinating and translating focus groups. Finally, thanks go to Maaike Fleuren for taking notes and her valuable input.
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