Getting young people off the streets and into gainful employment

The Chawama Youth Project was one of 5 projects out of a total of 30 to receive a silver award at the 2006/2007 Commonwealth Youth Developments Award in February 2007. 

The Chawama Youth Project is a small non-governmental organisation (NGO). Its main goal is to help young people in the disadvantaged township of Chawama on the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia. When the project was launched in 2001, most of Chawama’s young people were unemployed, crime was rife and their future was bleak. So, in order to give the young people a better start in life, the project set up a ‘Skills Training Centre’. The idea was to offer Chawama’s young people a wide range of short ‘life skills’ courses to improve their chances of either finding work or becoming self-employed.  

It soon became apparent that music was the key to reaching them: many of the young people began dropping into the Training Centre to ask if it was possible to have their ‘flows’ (raps in the local languages of Bemba and Nyanja) recorded on the computers so that they could promote their music on the radio and sell it on the streets. Helping young people to record their music in this way and burn it onto CDs was an ideal way to get them off the streets and involved in something constructive. The centre therefore decided to invest in a small recording studio for the whole community. The songs composed by the young people are very poignant. They express their hopes and dreams for the future and describe the everyday hardships of life in Zambia. Music gives them the chance to channel their energy and express their feelings about the social issues affecting their community today such as the plight of elderly women taking care of HIV/AIDS orphans. In this way the music component of the Chawama Youth Project, which happened quite by chance, has proved to be one of its most inspiring features. Aside from motivating Chawama’s young people to come to the centre, it has also attracted other members of the community such as Church choirs. The choirs use the recording studio to record their songs so that they in turn can sell their CDs to the congregation during the church services. This helps them to generate extra income for church activities.

Another positive spin-off from the steady influx of young people who initially came for the recording studio, was that it gave staff at the Training Centre the chance to introduce them to other skills training programmes on offer at the centre such as carpentry, joinery, car mechanics, electrical engineering and house wiring, tailoring and design, and ICT. This inspired many young people to try their hand at the other courses on offer: so far, the Skills Training Centre has trained a total of 300 people. It has also integrated ICT components into several of its courses to improve efficiency. Teachers are now using the Internet to find appropriate training material to enhance the content of their courses: for example, they now access diagrams of engines using Google Images instead of drawing and redrawing complex diagrams of engines on the blackboard by hand; student hand-outs can be produced quickly and easily; and existing lesson plans can be stored and re-used. The Training Centre is also using ICT to streamline administrative procedures and improve its own efficiency.

As a mark of its success, the centre is now attracting young people from outside Chawama who also wish to make use of its services.

Receiving the Silver Award at the Commonwealth Youth Development Awards 2006/2007 was a great honour for the Chawama Youth Project, particularly as all of the 30 projects shortlisted to receive the award had originally been nominated by the ministries responsible for youth in the member countries in the Africa Region. It is also a formal acknowledgement of the good work it has carried out in Chawama. Winning the Silver Award also means that the project has been entered for the ‘Pan-Commonwealth Gold Awards’. For more information about the Silver Award Winners, click here.