United by the mission and strategy of YMCA Vision 2030, YMCAs worldwide make a difference every day. From equipping young people and communities with skills for employment to supporting refugees, improving physical and mental health and developing innovative ways to protect our planet, our Movement is driving change.
We highlighted eight inspiring films showcasing this work at the YMCA Accelerator Summit in Mombasa, Kenya, held 21-25 October 2024.
We’ll share these films with you over the coming weeks. Here, we feature the Youth Justice III programme; click here to see last week’s feature, Vocational and Soft Skills.
Youth Justice III
Pillars: Community Wellbeing, Meaningful Work, Just World
YMCAs: YMCA/YWCA Sweden, YMCA Ghana, YMCAs across Africa
Project summary: Funded by Y-Care International, YMCA/YWCA Sweden, and Bread for the World (Germany), the African Youth Justice project has been implemented by YMCAs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, South Africa, Zimbabwe. Since 2015, it has supported some 169,000 young men and women who are in potential or actual conflict with the law. The project has also supported prison officers, mentoring them and helping them in and after prison.
Key project features: Among the results of the programme, a multi-country initiative that has formally been implemented since 2015:
- Improved the administration of justice for young people by securing the release of young persons from prison. Also, 150 prison officers have received basic training in psycho-social counselling for young inmates, therefore improving the mental health of inmates.
- Improved officer-inmate relationships in prison by increasing the capacity of prison officers to provide psycho-social support to inmates.
- Improved accountability and responsibility with regard to the role and mandate of the Ghana YMCA towards the community
- Improved level of reintegration services in Ghana’s Senior Correctional Centre. So far, 21 young people who have been released from prison have received various support such as return to school, feeding subsidies, scholarships, psychosocial counselling, etc.
- Improved mental health and well-being of beneficiaries, especially for over 400 young inmates in Ghana.
In their words: “In Ghana, if you are a youth and you are growing up here, we have so many challenges, which is concerning unemployment because we live in a country where we cannot get employed without knowing other people”.