'Youth Ki Awaaz' literally translates to voice of the youth in English.

YouthKiAwaaz.com is an integrated online platform for the youth to express themselves on issues of critical importance. The mission of YouthKiAwaaz.com is to be voice and ears to a large unheard youth community that fails to reach out to a mass audience when they raise their voices. We help them reach out to other like-minded people, to work on constructive solutions for global concerns by making best use of social media tools and online journalism skills – mobilizing and engaging young people in participatory and collaborative journalism.

With over 3 million monthly hits, Youth Ki Awaaz is one of the most prolific website/blog around, presenting youth views, opinions, analysis and reports on issues that matter. Since its inception in March 2008, it has had thousands of young people write for it, and millions of others contributing by reading, commenting and more.

In April 2010, Youth Ki Awaaz was awarded the Best Blog on Social Causes in India, and in September 2010, it also won the prestigious World Summit Youth Award by the International Center for New Media and the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development — for best practices in online journalism.

In October 2011, Youth Ki Awaaz won the Champions of Social Transformation award by the Baha’i Faith for its efforts towards youth empowerment.

Problem

India, a developing nation and the world’s largest democracy, has one of the largest youth populace in the world. However, being the second largest population makes it all the more difficult for people of this emerging democracy to express themselves freely at a large scale. Continuous bias by the mainline media and tampering of news values has further created a large divide between people and real, credible information. Participation of the citizen in decision making and addressing of issues has disappeared. The need really is to create a people powered alternative media platform which gives every citizen and non-citizen to address critical issues freely, making best use of journalism and emerging technologies. With such an alternative platform at hand, it shall become easier to reach out to a large youth populace of over 200 million, and empower them with the correct, credible information, free from bias and create a better understanding of issues that affect the nation, and build constructive solutions.

Solution

It needs to be understood that the urban educated youth has the power to change the way issues have been addressed in the past. Thus combining the dynamism of the youth with the power of journalism and new media to create compelling content that reaches out to a mass audience in order to create awareness, is one of the best uses of citizen media for development - this is where we come in. YouthKiAwaaz.com marries the combination of youth dynamism with the power of journalism to create compelling issue based content. We make use of various crowd sourcing and citizen journalism based models to make sure our beneficiaries play an important role in creation of content. We run a work-from-home, online journalism internship program, that mentors about 30 young participants every month in online journalism and new media skills, and engages them in reporting, content writing, research and much more. The aim of this internship is to get the participants to talk about critical issues and in the process gain and spread awareness about the same. Our another writers programs empowers every reader to contribute their views on various topics and join us as journalists.

Example

Young people in India are often left unheard. It is an integral aim of YouthKiAwaaz.com to bridge this gap by making best use of internet and mobile technology. 1) YouthKiAwaaz.com, the online platform, is a host to thousands of views by young people on various critical local and global issues. The aim of the portal is to create a citizen media based outlet for young people to express themselves on these issues and work on constructive solutions. We strongly believe that creating the right kind of awareness is the first step towards change - and YouthKiAwaaz.com is hitting the nail with content and technology. 2) Unlike the traditional media formats of television and newspaper, where the media talks to the audience, and not vice-versa, our model enables ease of interaction, creating a two-way flow for both the writer and the reader. We recently launched our Nokia app and are now working on an iPhone and Android app to enable citizen journalism through mobile. 3) Our internship program trains & equips young people with adequate communication and journalism skills to report on, & address critical issues. The program has been recognized by the International Center for New Media, Austria. The program helps the participants improve their skills and also makes them aware of various problems they would not have thought of otherwise. Similarly, our writers program enables anyone & everyone to be a part of the awareness-generation process. 4) Our pan India reach enables us to take up exclusive, hyper local issues which are usually unnoticed by the mainline media.

Marketplace

Even though there are many citizen journalism portals around the world, very few of them focus on views, and none who focus on constructive action towards societal good. We maintain our focus towards: 1) Educating young people about critical issues and how they affect them, 2) Views based reporting, 3) Continuous youth empowerment, 4) Training and educating young people on how to have a voice and an impact, 5) Strategically engaging with policy makers to help young people take constructive actions to the next level, and 6) Organizing educational workshops on entrepreneurship, journalism, youth activism, etc. to empower young people with the right knowledge. 7) Our innovation also lies in creation of collaborative platforms for social change, and we are working on a mobile application to enable education and awareness from anywhere on the planet.