Themes & Trends: Emerging Issues

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2. Funding the International Youth Sector

A review of the information gathered in the preparation of the Mapping of Donors indicates the emergence of several further themes of interest for donors engaged in the international youth sector. These are:

Youth Health and Healthy Lifestyles: HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted infections, drugs and alcohol abuse are all issues that are increasingly being subsumed under more comprehensive ideas about how young people view their health and lifestyles. For some organizations, such enlargement of focus has become a key to cracking the conundrum of youth–HIV/AIDS transmission; after many years of investment in HIV/AIDS prevention that focused on the negative consequences of risk, some organizations are finding that behavioral change programs that take account of the need and desire of young people to experiment have had better success rates. Funders and organizations with operational programs are interested in the potential for increased effectiveness of such approaches. In this context, youth-led/peer-led non-formal educational initiatives have had quite a lot of success and are gaining traction in terms of financial and institutional support.

Youth and Technology: The actual impact of the information and communications technologies (ICT) boom on the way young people participate in the civic life of their countries and more broadly in social interaction has not yet been fully understood. Funders are attracted by the possibility of engaging young people who are “not organized” in any way to some form of civic participation or socially useful pursuit. Funders, however, are also concerned about the possible dangers of young people retreating into virtual reality and losing all contact with the “real world.” Accordingly, they are currently experimenting with different ways of supporting young people’s engagement with technology for socially useful purposes.

Youth and Climate Change: Young people are demonstrating interest in the question of climate change, whether through their virtual social networking or through other activities of a peer-to-peer voluntary nature. Different kinds of institutional partners (including funding organizations) for whom the issue is also a priority are interested in the potential for mobilization around this issue and have shown interest in developing youth-adult partnerships that can support efforts to sustainably combat climate change.

The extent to which these themes will enter the “mainstream” of the funding strategies of significant donors in the IYS is difficult to assess. Risk is always present—a donor’s interest in a particular issue can prompt the presentation of a large number of projects on that issue by funding-hungry youth organizations, thus distorting actual needs in the field—especially at the local level where youth-driven projects are supposed to have the most significant impact.

In the different regions considered in this mapping, the importance given (in funding terms) to established and/or emergent themes differs considerably according to the specific circumstances of the continent in question and, most often, according to the scale of the challenge in relation to the specific issue in a given part of the continent. But, the issues outlined above remain dominant. The situation at the national level is, of course, highly differentiated—both between countries and within co

This mapping can only provide anecdotal evidence of trends in the approaches of the donor community on a particular continent; differences remain between direct grant-making approaches and operational programs in terms of thematic priorities. Nevertheless, the findings of the mapping point to some inadvertent organizing principles in the funding landscape for each continent: The key themes for Africa would seem to be HIV/AIDS and employment; in Latin America and the Caribbean, increasing attention is being paid to violence, crime and drugs, and entrepreneurship; in the Middle East and North Africa, education and participation come to the fore; in Asia, attention is being paid to health, participation, and employment. In Europe, citizenship and participation, international mobility and employability of young people are highest on the regional institutional agenda. At the same time, thematic diversity among and between regions does not differ so greatly and seems largely to be determined by the level of development of a given region.