Themes & Trends: Gaps and Challenges

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2. Funding the International Youth Sector

What seems to be obvious from this mapping is that the donor community is doing “a little bit of everything” when it comes to young people. Of course, as mentioned above, some issues dominate in terms of the investment attention they receive. But, no major issue of importance is completely neglected by any donor organization. The question is rather how the issues are covered and the extent of investment.

What should first be noted is that despite the large number and great variety of organizations active in the youth sector within the donor community, the scale of grant-making remains smaller than for operational programs. It is unclear whether this is an issue of trust—are young people and their associations not trusted to run activities that will have an important impact and, as a result, running operational programs is considered a “better bet”? Whatever the case, this mapping shows a dearth of investment in projects where young people themselves identify the needs, lead, and run the activities. Very few members of the donor community seem willing to fund young people’s own initiatives directly; it is particularly complicated when the initiative in question does not have some form of legal standing in the form of a formally registered association, etc. Where such funding is available, it remains extremely small scale and tends to fund “one off” type projects without prospects for repeat funding.

At the same time, evidence is present of a large gap in communication and, therefore, little synergy and cross-fertilization among members of the donor community. Many organizations have both grant-making and operational programs for young people and youth activities. These often measure success in terms of whether the young people involved “had a good experience” rather than in terms of real change in the situation of the young people concerned or in the policies affecting them. This is not to say that, for example, leisure-time or non-formal educational projects, such as youth exchanges, cannot be effective mechanisms for changing policies addressing youth. It does point to the fact that unless the funder in question develops some form of evidence-based evaluation or compliance mechanism for scaling up or leveraging the results of the funded activities, then policy-related outcomes are unlikely to be achievable. Such criteria are rarely, if ever, part of the approach to grant-making taken by the donor community—at least in the international youth sector.

The mapping also points to the clear and obvious fact that for many in the international donor community, the “population group” represented by young people is an invisible category that they consider to be implicitly covered by their investment in other priorities. In this context, the saying “the rising tide raises all boats, big or small” comes to mind. Young people are seen as benefiting from funders’ investments in development simply by being part of the population targeted by a given program or funding plan, rather than requiring specific attention to address and redress the special disadvantages they face because they are young. Evidence for this can be found in the very obvious lack of “youth-specific funders” and in the preference for operational programs benefiting young people over grant-making for youth-specific purposes.

A further issue is the lack of clarity and transparency about how members of the donor community active in the youth sector make decisions about which issues they engage with and how they establish the needs assessment for their programs. Certainly what remains exceptional is the direct consultation of the young people concerned with a given issue or targeted by a given funding mechanism about what they feel they need. More often, the internal priorities of an organization, as outlined by its mission, are what determine the kinds of issues and youth projects that will be of interest to the donor rather than any real needs assessment.

Finally, it is clear from this mapping that there is plenty of money in the youth sector. This is, however, unevenly distributed across continents and across themes and target groups within the diverse world youth community. For example, the European youth sector is well funded considering the financial allocations disbursed by the European Commission and the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. But even this relative privilege does not adequately provide for a number of important dimensions essential to the health and sustainability of the international youth sector, notably the sustainability of youth organizations, cooperation, partnership and coalition-building with the youth sectors of different regions, and the institutionalization of structures of cooperation at the international level. At the regional level and in terms of global cooperation, significant gaps in funding exist; such gaps affect the ability of credible and democratically legitimated youth sectors to emerge in each of the individual regions despite best international efforts to support regional youth platforms. Also adversely affected are structural development and organizational capacity building or institutional consolidation/professionalization of the youth sectors in the different regions considered here.

The major gap in funding might be understood more in terms of approach than in terms of thematic coverage. Discussion is absent about how the international donor community understands its role vis-à-vis the existence and functioning of the international youth sector. It is not even clear if most members of the donor community active in supporting the youth sector consider their actions in those terms or whether they consider young people as just another population of beneficiaries. Meaningful dialogue between donors and young people and their organizations is largely missing, with the exception of certain mechanisms for consultation and cooperation put in place by some regional institutions.

Even where some form of dialogue exists, many misconceptions and misunderstandings are present. Many youth organizations are trapped in a kind of vicious cycle: they are required to be more professional to access grants and fund their projects, but without additional financial support for consolidation and organizational capacity building they cannot become more professional—and very few members of the donor community will provide this kind of funding.