DevelopmentA Partnership for

A Partnership for Development

The Pravah ACTIVATE! exchange programme is a partnership funded by Norec which at its core represents a development mechanism which endeavors to ensure that young people are interacting and connecting with others, resources and opportunities in order to help elevate the work they are already doing through their respective community projects and ensure the sustainability thereof. Hence both organisations are passionately committed to seeing young people realise and explore their development potential in their interest areas.

“Our work is similar in that we both work on youth leadership but ACTIVATE!’s focus area is on community development led by young leaders while Pravah focuses on self-development of the youth along with community development, so we’re different enough to ensure that we can learn from each other . Pravah’s premise is on building youth leadership for bringing

about social change,” says Arathi Kurup, Programme Coordinator at Pravah.

This essentially highlights the value of collaboration in addressing youth development challenges. This is particularly important within the context of the global south where solutions for the challenges which countries have to grapple with daily lies in building and strengthening strategic partnerships between various actors, in particular civil, public and private sectors, including amongst young people themselves. Given its value in transforming experiences into learning, the exchange programme is an important platform for building global networks that can bridge socio-economic and geographic divides among young people. Participants from both ACTIVATE! and Pravah are in a unique position to learn from and impart their own knowledge and skills to others.

Capacity Building Manager at ACTIVATE! Change Drivers, Bongiwe Ndlovu highlights the importance of south to south development interventions, pointing out opportunities for shared learning for organisations from countries sharing common socio-economic characteristics like South Africa and India. “We wanted to work with Pravah as they work just like us, they train young people

in a developmental context like ours and they have their own curriculum and vision for youth development. We wanted to see how we could work together. We did a feasibility study to assess the value that participants would derive from this initiative by travelling to the respective countries (India and South Africa), and we found that we share a lot more in common than what sets us apart such as issues of rife gender based violence that also affect young people. The aim is to gain insights as a young person on how similar issues are tackled differently in another county and to bring back those lessons

learnt and shared with others to elevate their work within their communities,” she stated.

Exchange orientation training in Muizenberg Cape Town Hendrik Dale, Norwegian Agency for Exchange Cooperation (Norec) Programme Adviser further outlines this point by stating that “Our

aim with the exchanges we fund is to create change at three levels by benefitting the individual, the organisations involved and on a community level – that is Norec’s Theory of Change. The individual on the exchange learns new skills. Young people are not aware of what they’re capable of, the skills they learn are beneficial and they can use them at home. Then the exchange of best-practice between the organisations strengthens their capacity. On a community level, the organisations Norec supports work with and provide services to their local communities and so we hope these exchanges will lead to improved outcomes for the communities.”

“Our most important core value is reciprocity (the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit). We don’t want one organisation to send volunteers to teach and the other organisation must learn. We want it to be reciprocal. Both organisations have lots of skills that can benefit each other, in this case both organisations have as much to teach as they have to gain from that partnership. Pravah’s mission of strengthening

the self, which in turn strengthens the community and ACTIVATE’s strength in how they have built and sustained the alumni

network, we saw that both organisations could benefit and exchange knowledge,” he added.

Over and above being a learning platform for exchange participants, the Pravah ACTIVATE! exchange programme further represents an important platform for the two organisation to share best-practices and innovative ways to enhance their respective potential. In the long run, the partnership aims to influence other south-south cooperation spaces that impact the lives of young people. Executive Director at ACTIVATE! Tebogo Suping succinctly expounds on this idea by stating that “As an organisation, we want to reach

outwards, outside of our countries so we can both leverage from the knowledge and skills to help us be more effective. The

exchange is a learning platform to help us be able to service young people better.”