Aweh Youth Groups

The aweh youth groups are groups of young people, who mostly stay in little fisher villages along the south coast and west coast of the western cape and are attending a programme of the NGO people to people, run by Coleridge Daniels who has worked with youth at risk.

The programme the Aweh (slang for “Aware”) youth groups go through consists of community work in their villages, self and group development sessions as well as a training for the young people in business, computer and environmental skills.

The aim of the project is to empower and train these young people to set up their own business as a cooperative, to be aware of the needs that are in their communities and respond to them.

In those communities, there are no jobs, no possibilities for young people to get further skills and education and transport to bigger towns is hard to access and mainly to expensive for people to afford regularly. Mostly, the only work that is available in these areas is domestic work in the white households around. These jobs are really poorly paid though and also don’t contain any perspectives for the young people.

Fishing, which used to be the main income of most families has become much harder, as big international fishing companies with industrial boats have taken over this job, leaving hardly any fish in the sea. Additionally, from the side of the government, restrictions on how many fish local people that don’t work in a registered company can catch, have been introduced, so that in order to make a living out of fishing, many people do it illegally and at night.

A possible involvement with these initiatives of the young people in Connectivity could be all sorts of Community work being done at the Action day of the Conference.  The young people we met were really interested in being part of a bigger picture and international network.

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