Civic Games

Increasing Civic Participation
Using games

Project Background

It has been a vicious circle of bad governance, unaccountable leadership, citizen apathy and system decay over the years in the Nigeria political system. This has had adverse evident effects on the citizenry, the political structure and the systems in place which have been more detrimental than beneficial to the Nigerian populace.

In times past, the major concern about active youth participation in governance process and policy making is that there is inadequate information available to the youth, ignorance of the grave responsibility placed on them and insufficient civic education deprived the youth of the requisite knowledge to cause any change in our society.

The project is aimed at using entertainment to educate young Nigerians and stimulate their interest in getting involved in the process.

The goal of this project is to stimulate and reinforce active citizenship and participation in governance among young Nigerians between the ages of 13 and 17 using edutainment tools. In particular, this project:

  • uses a board game as its edutainment tool
  • will target students in 6 secondary schools
  • will be implemented in Abuja

Project Objectives

1. Engage up to 400 young people

2. Increase their civic knowledge

3. Establish them as civic ambassadors

Project Activities

1. Receiving the games & testing: Here the Aspilos team and a pre-selected and randomly selected subset of our target audience will review the game. This will help us understand the game better and get the perspective of the target audience so we are able to better design the competition process and the required communication and advocacy materials.

2. Recruitment of participating students: we will be reaching out to 6 schools: 3 in each state requesting from 10 students from each class making it 60 students per school and 300 in total

3. Setting up and running of school clubs: the 60 students will over a period of 4 weeks (one day per week) have team competitions with 5 people (the final number will be determined by what the game actually requires) emerging as winners who will represent the school in the inter-school competition. The club competition will also enable them get acquainted with the game.

4. Inter school competition: this will be done in one day simultaneously in both states and will involve the heats, semi-finals and finals. All students in the clubs will be invited as well as other stakeholders from the society. A total of 500 people will be targeted to attend the competition.