Groups of young people loitering aimlessly, drinking alcohol and puffing away all day is a common sight in Msogwaba near Nelspruit in Mpumalanga, South Africa. In fact, Msogwaba is widely acknowledged as the crime capital of Mbombela municipality. Coming across a group of youth would normally lead many to seek police intervention but not with this particular group of young people calling themselves Oneness Revival Team (ORT).
ORT was founded as a prayer group in 2003 by Stanley Mathebula, the current director. The group has since transformed into a fully fledged non-profit organisation serving hundreds of youth in this township (‘a God forsaken township’ as the media routinely refer to it).
To go from being an informal prayer group to a youth development organisation with an annual budget of more than 600,000 rand (USD $73,000) is phenomenal. Surely these young people must have an impressive knowledge and understanding of sustainable development, youth empowerment and other such lofty and sublime concepts? But they don’t.
According to Stanley, the director, their core business is to “ensure young people have access to information and that no young person should ever have to stand alone.” In development-speak, they would be said to be into lifeskills training, provision of psychosocial support and skills development. But these young people do not use such terms, probably because they do not understand them, but it does not matter because they continue to initiate programmes that meet their own needs, and it is here that they are having much success.
Phillip Mulungo, former Mpumalanga Provincial Manager for the National Youth Development Agency, admits that NYDA’s much publicised youth entrepreneurship development programme was a monumental flop. “It was too idealistic and did not take into account the practical realities that our youth in disadvantaged areas live in,” he comments. This begs the question, how responsive are government supported youth programmes? Does it not make sense to support genuinely youth driven initiatives like ORT?
A research paper by the South African Institute of Race Relations on South African youth released in March 2011 found that, despite the many challenges faced by young people, some 94% of 12 to 22-year-olds questioned had a good idea of where they are heading in life, 99% had specific goals they wanted to achieve, and 97% believed their own actions and efforts would determine whether they met these desired goals. It would thus be a shame if the efforts of these youths are not supported.
ORT has received capacity building support from the Desmond Tutu Centre for Leadership under a mentoring project for youth organisations. This initiative is funded by the German Development Service. They have been trained in such areas as project management, governance, financial management and project proposal writing. This project focuses mainly on building the management capacity of youth serving organizations in Mpumalanga and does not prescribe development programmes.
The success of ORT is ample evidence that youth empowerment is possible if young people are left to chart their own destiny. Government, development agencies and non-governmental organisations can only create an enabling environment through providing resources and capacity building.