By Miriam Wood
I recently spent a year working in a youth centre in Port Vila, Vanuatu for out of school youth. In Vanuatu most young people finish school before they reach secondary level as there is no government funding for public schools and the school fees push a huge number of them out of the formal education sector. This means throughout Vanuatu there is a generation of young people cheated of a formal education who are looking to fill the gap. Some are lucky and get to enroll in Rural Training Centres, where they learn things such as building or mechanics. Others get a job working on a copra boat. Some return to their villages and work in the family garden, maybe starting their own patch of kava, or yam for sale. But for those who have joined the urban drift, and are living in Port Vila, the choices are somewhat limited. As with most capital cities, the cost of living in Port Vila is high, food and transport are expensive, education and training courses have high fees and most young people are living within a large extended family with a vast list of chores.

Programmes for unemployed youth in Port Vila
The centre I worked in is funded by AusAid and NZAid, along with a number of smaller funders for specific projects. Courses are offered in sewing, nutrition, computers, literacy, music, dance, sports, photography and art. Young people pay 100vatu ($1.50 NZD) to become members and this allows them to attend any of the above classes for the full year. There are over 900 registered members. The youth centre also has a sexual health clinic attached to it and runs several compulsory workshops focusing on reproductive health family planning and STI’s as Vanuatu has the one of the highest rate of STI’s in the Pacific.

There are other centres delivering programmes for unemployed youth in Port Vila, run by Oxfam, Unicef, World Vision, Youth Challenge and church and youth groups. The most common element of all these different programmes is workshops, which are short-term or one-off training sessions, where young people are usually provided with a certificate of some kind. Some organisations use their funding to take young people to international conferences, some take groups to remote outer islands to work on community projects, some run events in town, but all run workshops for lifeskills, preparing job applications and leadership.

Is there a problem with workshops?
Recently I was forced to ask myself this question. I had organised a literacy teacher to come in and spend a morning with the youth tutors who run our children’s literacy class. Not being in the workshop mindset, we got right into it and started on the lesson. We were only ten minutes in when one young women raised her hand and asked “Do we get lunch provided?”
She was quite confused about what was happening. There had been no icebreaker game, no name-tags, no assurance that morning tea and lunch were going to be provided and I hadn’t specifically said “You will get a certificate at the end of this session”. I could see the thought racing through her mind “This isn’t a workshop! I’m wasting my time!” Nevertheless she stayed, and despite not getting a certificate for spending two hours with a literacy teacher she feels like she learnt something important during that time. The question I was left asking myself was, are the youth centres putting emphasis on the wrong thing? What is more important, actual learning or a certificate that says you have learnt something?’ Is it worth providing so many lunches and bus fares, for young tutors to come and learn just a fraction of what is needed to become an effective teacher?

Is there another way?
Imagine all the youth agencies coming together, pooling resources and deciding to send a handful of young people through school, through university and set them up so they are able to support their family and break the cycle of poverty. What about focusing energies on vocational training, leading young people to real jobs, rather than providing watered down education opportunities, in the disguise of workshops on lifeskills.

I know there are benefits to reaching many young people as opposed to few — workshops on reproductive and sexual health are necessary because the young people are not learning this at school. I saw one or two kids actively use the free services at the clinic and take the condoms, and then watching another young teenage mum coming in with her new baby I thought “well maybe that workshop was effective if it stopped just one more teenage solo mum”. Workshops on budgeting are necessary, so that when the young people do get money, they use it effectively and workshops on lifeskills are useful because they can inspire young people into thinking about who they want to be and how they can get there. After completing a workshop a couple of youth members took some initiative and put their new skills to use and actually found jobs which have given them more training while earning money. This would not have happened had they not come to the initial workshop. But I am still left with the question, is it really the best use of millions of dollars in aid money annually?

It’s the “quality versus quantity” debate and it is raging hotly in development circles across the world. It is about making the most of aid money. After being directly involved this year, I think I have a greater understanding of both sides of the argument, but I will always be in two minds, purely because there are advantages on both sides. In Vanuatu, a vast range of services are being provided to young people, funded by aid money. I know they are all useful in some way, yet I still have that nagging question of ’what if?’ What if, instead of sending one youth to Australia for one week, we paid their school fees for a year? Whatever the answer I truly believe that education is the ticket out of poverty.

LEARN MORE & TAKE ACTION:

Vanuatu profile

Secretariat of the Pacific (SPC) — a Non-Government Organisation based in Fiji and New Caledonia which has heaps of info about Pacific issues, plus links to other sites.

Wan Smolbag Theatre works with communities through drama to provide a greater understanding of development issues in the South Pacific.

Buy some Good Books and help Oxfam support the Wan Smolbag Theatre.