Youth Challenge International (YCI) - Overview

Overview

The organization’s mission is to “build the skills, experience and confidence of young people to effect positive change in their communities”(3).

YCI’s operations and programming is rooted in 4 core principles:

• Youth Involvement: Youth take active decision making and leadership roles in YCI’s projects
• Volunteerism: The spirit of volunteerism as central to, and a key force motivating YCI’s work
• Partnership: Working with local, youth-led or youth focused organizations
• Youth Capacity Building: YCI seeks to help both youth and youth development organizations build the capacity to work autonomously as effective change agents in their respective communities

YCI operates on the belief that truly effective aid must have an explicitly youth focus – economic and social development outcomes cannot be improved without youth-specific programming. Youth represent a large share of the Global South’s population structure with 1.3 billion young people aged 12 to 24 now living in developing countries. As the largest cohort of developing country youth in history, this group now makes up well over half the population of most developing countries. A critical challenge facing this population is youth unemployment, compounded by the HIV/AIDS crisis, gender inequality and disenfranchisement. Taking into account these factors, YCI’s program rationale focuses on targeting these issues to promote positive youth-focused change in the developing world.

Typically, YCI operates programs in countries characterized as politically stable, less developed countries that have an existing development relationship with the northern partners of YCI such as Canada and Australia. Organizations that YCI has collaborated with include: Youth Challenge Guyana in Guyana, Reto Juvenil International in Costa Rica, Youth Challenge Australia in Vanuatu, ZANGOC and Faraja Trust in Tanzania, YMCA-Ghana in Ghana, Association for Adolescent Development and the Program for Adolescent Mothers in Grenada, and Emmanuel Development Association in Ethiopia. All of YCI’s partners are fully autonomous non-profit organizations with an indigenous board of directors and local staff. An international complement of field staff joins this base to help deliver field projects in each country. YCI’s long term development goal is to assure that each partner has the stability and capacity to develop a greater regional role in designing, managing and evaluating important development, health and conservation projects, along with increasing the participation of local youth and community stakeholders

In addition, YCI has built relationships with other Canadian organizations including most recently, YMCA Canada and YMCA GTA as well as Club 2/3 and Oxfam Quebec, developing collaborative programming in both Ghana and Benin.