“Without the Youth4Policy Fellowship I could have never reached so far with my policy idea”, emphasized Dorcas Okello, a Youth4Policy alumna. She pointed out how the Fellowship helped her pursue influencing policy, profiting from peer-learning and sharing insights into public policy in Uganda’s political context. She encouraged the current cohort of Youth4Policy Fellows to put all their time and passion into their policy research in order to make the best out of their fellowship programme. Thus, the networking dinner provided a platform to highlight the progress of the Youth4Policy Alumni and Fellows, who both are advancing in their careers as well as in their paths of policy influencing.

Dr Fred Muhumuza, who has been involved in development policy research, analysis, formulation and review for over twenty years, with a parallel teaching career at Makerere University, provided mind-opening insights into the policy space. “To understand why governments fail and others succeed - that is the main challenge while working in the field of policy-making", he stated. He went into more detail on the multitude of actors involved in influencing political decision-making processes and their outcomes in Uganda. He stressed that democratic decision-making does not always lead to an optimal result and can be lengthy.

After the internal sharing and reflection by the Youth4Policy Alumni and current Fellows to highlight professional and policy influencing engagements, the fellows had enough time to share their policy interests and engage intellectually with important subject professionals. That enabled them to appreciate better the ways of manoeuvring around complexities and uncertainties in Uganda’s public policy architecture to influence policy outcomes. In addition to that, they could generate their own ideas and resources to build a cohesive and pragmatic policy community to support each other.