The project BRYCA – Building Resistance in Youth in Central Asia to the influence of illegal hate speech and misinformation online and on social media took place between November 2019 – November 2022 in four countries in Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. It was funded by the European Commission with a total budget of 1.8 million Eur and implemented by 5 partners: IREX Europe/ ERIM, Media Support Center Foundation (Kyrgyzstan), MediaNet International Centre for Journalism (Kazakhstan), Modern journalism development center (Uzbekistan), and Public Organization “Gurdofarid” (Tajikistan).

The project’s goal was for Central Asia’s most vulnerable youth populations to have increased resilience to disinformation and hate speech. In order to achieve this, the BRYCA project used two approaches:

1. Development of the QLEVER games platform containing a series of educational games designed to attract youth to play through winning credits.
2. A series of cascading trainings transferring capacity from an international trainer, to 8 national “super-trainers”, then to over 1000 local educators, who finally implemented trainings with more than 4000 youth. Teaching materials were also disseminated via the already popular Media Sabak platform and translated into the 5 languages of the project. 

Our team conducted a final evaluation of both of the project’s major components – the QLEVER educational games platform and capacity building in media information literacy.

Our team’s expert on educational digital content analysed the outputs of the QLEVER games platform, looking at the process to develop the educational content of the games, the platform’s reach of the planned target group, the extent to which the user engagement strategies have been effective, as well as changes achieved at user level, the extent to which users’ game performance over time can be associated with increased MIL knowledge and skills.

With regards to media and information literacy, this section looks at the extent to which the project has achieved its objective of expanding access to online information and educational tools through the Media Sabak platform, and also at how the MIL training programme has contributed to the achievement of the project’s objectives.