Survival of the youngest

Abstract

The Commonwealth has a long acknowledged problem attracting and retaining the interest of young people and has run a designated youth programme for three decades. However, at the start of the new millennium the organization seems no nearer to successfully addressing the challenge of how to remain relevant to new generations of Commonwealth citizens. In trying to transform apathy about the Commonwealth among younger people, the association has generally not sought, nor been offered, the active assistance of the 69 accredited pan-Commonwealth non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that make up a key part of the unofficial Peoples' Commonwealth. This article analyses how these organizations could work to increase youth interest, not just in the Commonwealth as a concept and as an organization, but in their own work. The article concludes that, without an assessment of youth needs and interests, a number of pan-Commonwealth NGOs face diminishing members, or even extinction, within a generation, something that could be a precursor to the fate of the Commonwealth itself unless political will, better cross-sector resource mobilization and creative thinking are all fused together.