I have been involved in youth and community development for 19 years. This career has seen me travel from small town to small town, city to city, village to village impacting lives of South Africa's youth through school-based programmes aimed at addressing among others HIV/AIDS, Sexuality, Self Image and Career counseling.

The organisations that I worked with may not have had all the money in the world to do the work they wanted to do in schools, however, they put their best foot foot forward and did the best with amidst the scarcity of resources. One of these organisations, Youth For Christ, a Christian movement, which put into our hands a skill to be able to engage across the racial, class, and cultural divide through their youth volunteer teams. It was through these youth teams that we learnt how to work with the little you have and still produce quality youth interventions that are able to speak into the lives of young people and bring the change.

I have noticed, though, over the years how community development have become a CSI playground. Many well meaning funders have injected massive budgets into numerous youth and community based programmes without a clear objective. Theirs is just another programme and another mechanism they can use to tick the box and prove to the taxman that they have offered help. This tendency is not just a corporate/company fault but the error of governments in developing countries like South Africa.
A large population of of our country is still dependent on grants. We are getting used to dependency from the moment we are born. This dependency follows us to school where our school management teams and principals, who are supposedly CEOs of these governmental institutions, seems to be unclear as to where they are leading their schools. 

Welcome to the new era of dependency! 

We seem to be perpetuating a dependency syndrome in a so-called free society.

What if we changed our approach? What if we allowed people and community based institutions become aware of the importance of self-determination? After all isn't that the reason why we fought for freedom? Self determination? 

My fear is that the longer we keep on feeding this dependency the more depleted our resources will become.

The question is: how long can we keep this going?

I wonder...