African youth claiming their space, influencing for positive transformation

Hi all, below are excerpts from a wrap-up article on the Summit that you will find on the Africa Alliance website: www.africaymca.org ...

A new breed of African youth leaders is emerging through African YMCAs – youth willing to stand up as citizens in their countries and our continent… The Summit focused on building the civic competence of youth participants to enable personal leadership development which is rooted in community responsibility and action…

“The transformation involved us gaining both subjective and actual competence, to emerge as the first group of S2C Ambassadors. These ambassadors will be held accountable for the roll-out of the S2C throughout the youth movement in the YMCA and for continuous personal development,” said Reginald Ffaulkes Crabbe from Ghana YMCA, and a member of the Africa Alliance youth committee.

Samukele Ngubane from South Africa said, “The methodology was very empowering. We were challenged at an individual and group level to look beyond the crises that youth face and really dig into the root causes. Some of those we identified included crisis of identity and self-esteem, superficial spirituality, lack of drive and purpose, and a poverty mentality as well as a ‘no choice’ mentality where we just focus on problems and not opportunities. Of course, this feeds directly into our beliefs and values as youth that we are inferior, victims, have a dependency syndrome and an individualistic attitude.”

This is a huge move forward in modeling how youth view and respond to the challenges in our leadership and our programme offerings in Africa – one that looks at root causes instead of results or effects.

“We were able to make a clear link between our development as individual leaders and institutional leadership development. We all set personal goals, which then fed into action plans that we made to roll out the S2C model on a practical level in our movements across Africa. We are also guided by the Summit Creed which binds us together and to our commitment going forward,” explained Maryse Coly from Senegal.

A major goal of the Summit is for YMCAs in Africa to play a stronger role in advocacy to create more citizens with voice, space and ability to influence.

David Ngosa from Zambia said, “Our key focus over the next year is to develop as many of our youth as possible to a level of S2C Ambassadorship. The belief in ourselves now is the basis of our civic competence, and this has been enhanced with hard skills we learnt such as those of advocacy. We are confident we will be able to begin to positively influence decision making processes and policy formation in favour of us as youth. At the same time, we are developing ourselves as future leaders for Africa.”