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MAINSTREAMING THE SUBJECT TO CITIZEN CONCEPT INTO YMCA PROGRAMMING

Prosper K Hoeyi
NGS
YMCA, Ghana.

The YMCAs of Africa have rediscovered their passion for youth work and in their quest to reposition themselves as the champions of youth

The YMCAs of Africa have rediscovered their passion for youth work and in their quest to reposition themselves as the champions of youth development, have resolved to build the civic competence of young people through a concept called “From Subjects to Citizens”, abbreviated as S2C. For this reason, young people from various national movements on the continent were recently sponsored to represent their respective countries at a YMCA Youth Summit organized in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from the 28th October to 5th November 2009. Some Ghanaian youth also attended this summit.

The YMCA is noted for its strength in rendering services such as education, sports and recreation, health, vocational/technical training and hostel accommodation. However, with dwindling donor funding and increasing competition for funding in the NGO sector service delivery is becoming a huge challenge for most development organizations.

It is for this reason that since the 1990’s most civil society organizations have been shifting to the policy side of the development equation where they seek to influence development policies through advocacy and campaigning. It is thought that focusing the limited resources on attaining a policy change will make more impact on the lives of the disadvantaged than having an organization spread its resources thinly on service delivery. After all, such an organization does not collect taxes from the people, but can use its limited resources to empower the people to demand accountability and good governance from those who are entrusted with the resources of the people (government and its partners).

In this light, the civic competence model embedded in our S2C concept appears to be taking us away from service delivery and putting us firmly on an advocacy path. But as YMCAs can we break away from our service delivery tradition? A real dilemma!

Rather than viewing S2C as a stand-alone programme that replaces our service delivery mandate, we could view it as a kind of operating system that all our programmes run on. This means changing our mindset to develop and implement programmes and projects with a citizen’s mentality. Programmes and projects even in the service delivery domain could then be assessed to determine if they help beneficiaries to believe in themselves and become self-reliant (citizens) or reinforce their sense of helplessness and dependency (subjects).

Whether in service delivery or advocacy, S2C could become the guiding principle that drives us to propel our beneficiaries from a lower state of equilibrium to a higher and more fulfilling level of equilibrium where their tangible and intangible needs are met.

By Prosper K Hoeyi,
National General Secretary,
Ghana YMCA.

posted onTuesday, January 26, 2010