Have we benefited from youth participation?

My reflections on International youth day.

The International youth day is significant especially now when young people constitute 40% of the 7 billion global population.

Besides their numbers, youth constitute the economic active age group, emerging leadership, the today compliant - simply what others have termed the window of hope.

In countries like Zimbabwe, there is an unprecedented growth of the youth population (15-35 years), causing a "youth bulge" that communities, governments, the civil society and business sector has to comprehend.

Depending on the policies, strategies and systems that are developed to carter for this youth population, countries can either benefit or become more insecure depending on how they deliver to the demands of young people.

Given the global attention on promoting youth participation, harnessing the youth as agents of development and catalysts of sustainable societies remains an illusion.

Although global calls have been made to proclaim "decade of the youth", "year of the youth" and other internationally negotiated documents, the real aggregates of this focus are minimal.

The agenda of youth participation has resulted in a counterproductive culture were systems, regimes or structures have been created to either "feed" young people or "feed on" the young people.

There is an obvious divide of young people that have been "fed" by the status quo and those that have been "fed on".

The justified call for youth participation has created youth "activists" that have become an extension of systems, structures and regimes.

These young people participate in conferences, receive capacity building to the extent of saturation, have access to empowerment resources which they normally abuse as representatives of institutions and interests, they spend much of their time at airports than in communities they supposedly represent.

This group of young people has provided the status quo with a convenient justification that "look there are young people taking part in processes and being consulted".  They symbolise youth participation although most of their sentiments, issues and representation are not rooted in the organic affairs of "real" young people that you would find in communities.

Given that exposure, capacity building and opportunity has crafted in them an art of articulating issues, they dominate public forums and make proclamations of issues that either lack common appeal to young people or have been recycled to the extent of redundancy.

Especially now with the world of social media, there is a mediated reality that is foreign to the bigger population of young people and their discourse lack the ingenuity of real youth or is too emotive towards self gratification rather than common good to young people who are faced with high unemployment, high disease burden, a crippled education systems and political repression.

The youth movement has become a commodity for a minority youth that either have developed the tact of making convenient demands that scatter on real issues or those that can make case on how they can best represent the concerns and aspirations of young people.

The sad reality is that such platforms for articulating the plight of young people are important but unfortunately have been subject to abuse by those that have come to know the rewards of the development sector (perdiums, flights, five star hotels and visibility).

A lot of these proclaimed activists do not find time to interact with young people at the grassroots level, they increasingly distance themselves from the real young people through the convenient excuse of operating at higher levels.

The development architecture has robbed the need for a strong work ethic in these young people who no longer desire to work harder because their time is spent participating or seeking to participate in the lucrative forums.

Hope for the youth movement to become stronger is increasingly becoming difficult to foresee. Benefits from youth participation have been welcomed by those that access shifting attention from issues.

The other group of young people that has been created by the systems, structures and regimes is that which the status quo "feeds on".

This group of young people are the ones whose challenges are articulated in proposals, they are the helpless lot that need aid, support and the mercy of development, they are the "voiceless" who needs advocates and activists to speak on their behalf, they are the gullible who for a T-shirt would pose for a photo for the donor, instigate violence or consider themselves as lucky than the other.

This group of young people are the reason for aid and support not only for their direct benefit but rather for all those that are part of the supply chain. They are part of the approximately 238 million youth who live in extreme poverty of less than $1 a day; they are also the 11.8 million young people who are living with HIV or AIDS, they are the 300,000 child soldiers around the world.

They are the raw materials to the development agenda and they are the blood line to the call for participation.

Although it is their plight that we wish to address, they are marginalised from the public sphere because of real and created "barriers" of language, technology or simply clarity.

The real issue for now is how do we bridge the gap between these two distinct groups of young people especially given the corrupting tendency of the carrot dangled and the obvious stick that cautions those with access to resources to know the potential relapse into abject poverty.

The calls for youth participation have not been anchored on a sustainable model but rather they have ingeniously been created to continue serve the interests of those we sought to question. Participation is convenient and attractive but does not address the multi-faceted challenges youth face.

The youth movement has to take lessons from the women's movement that it is not participation they should celebrate but rather it is power that they should hope to negotiate.

Youth should find themselves in real positions were they are not only limited to influence an agenda but shape the direction and outcomes of development.

The Youth need to reorganise themselves for the common purpose of creating collective power based on their numbers, ideas and influence as the game changers of any future.

They need to increasingly recognise that they can also create so much power by being local but global citizens who learn from one another, create coalitions and identify how issues can be connected as dots of a common thread.