Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2026
I am Godfrey Slavius, Managing Director of the Africa Regional Centre for the International Youth Media Summit and based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
I coordinate delegate logistics and communications for a Summit that has, over 20 years, brought together over 1700 young delegates from 81 countries across six continents to create short films on discrimination, poverty, violence, women’s rights, the environment, youth empowerment, and health. Our most recent edition took place in Paris in 2026, with about 54 delegates from 13 countries. Much of my recent work has involved a question that sits just beside the logistics, how well do we actually understand what happens after a young person makes a film.
The films themselves have always found their way home. Delegates have carried them back to their own communities and shown them since the very first Summit. One delegate from Rwanda, Muhinda, once described the Summit as a trigger, asking himself why he could not be the one to make change in his own generation. He went on to build a weekly podcast exploring how technology is reshaping arts, culture, and business across Africa. What we did not have, until recently, was a way to see that ripple effect clearly, to know how far each film travelled or what it moved once it arrived.
So, we welcomed Listen Out Loud Media, an impact and engagement agency that works with filmmakers, to help us build a proper way of seeing it. Together we are shaping a post Summit impact campaign for our most recent Summit, which concluded in Paris on July 30, 2026, one that asks delegates to report on what they did with their films at home, and turns those reports into a real impact assessment rather than an assumption.
The first lesson was that a real story is stronger than a polished one. Muhinda’s podcast did not come from a spreadsheet; it came from a delegate telling us what he actually did after he went home. It would have been easy to lead with only the scale we already had, the countries and the numbers. We chose to keep asking what that scale actually moved in a single classroom or a single living room, because those individual answers are what a program can genuinely learn from.
If you evaluate youth or arts programming, I would welcome hearing how your organization thinks about the space between the making of something and its life afterward. That space is where I now spend most of my attention.
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