Interview with Lenin Kazoba

Lenin Kazoba: Firstly I can say that TYC it’s a union of 120 non-governmental youth organizations, 249 Youth Enterprise Groups (YEGs) and hundreds of youth individuals countrywide in Tanzania and it started its work in 2002 as a loose network, because by that time it was not allowed by law for organizations or coalitions to be registered. Until 2004 when the government changed its laws it took almost three years until we’ve been officially registered in 2007. The main work is capacity building and awareness raising to facilitate that young people are heard on the local and national level. To give young people a voice in our country and to change the society.

Primarily we are working in five areas. One is the Youth Livelihood. The Youth Livelihood is an appointment. The second is building local democracy and good governance. The third covers  gender and youth health. The fourth one is coalition building and networking as well as exchange. Also we have an environment and Youth livelihood.

Our future main area will be youth exchange, within the set ups of networking and coalition building. We are working with partners which we can strengthen through the exchange programme because most of our partners are working in different activities or areas. Through the component of increased exchange it gives them the room for volunteers to work in the different fields. That’s in short what I can say.

Lenin Kazoba: That’s a very good question. Always expectations are quite big. People really want to see big expectations and especially good results. We already knew it and we’re prepared for that. In order just to see this initiative different and bring a lot of changes to our society. Not only in Tanzania but in East Africa because we’ll be also involving other partners when we’re getting the partners in Kenya, Uganda and other countries as well. This I’m sure it will bring a lot of encouragement to other people to work for the second time maybe because it’s a pilot project for three years. So I hope after three years they could see a lot of achievements. We as an implementing partner are going to bring many supporters on board to work together. At the moment now it’s not yet structured on how we should work. So we have to involve a lot of partners. We now opened up the big forum. Now everyone who is involved in the exchange in Tanzania wants to work together.

So we can expand and include other organizations, which also want to be on board. They can come in and they can be inspired.

Many things have been started already but maybe not really in a proper way. So we’re going to strengthen more and I’m sure we’ll be really more popular. We see that from our government. They said it yesterday – they’ll give us the support and we’ll be working closely with them. This is an area where we’re really looking forward to work with young people and meet many stakeholders for example in the vocational training, at the universities, in civil society and also special groups of young people who are doing their cultural activities and  sports as well.

Lenin Kazoba: After the launch now there’ll be a lot of work to be done on the ground before the project itself is starting next year in general. But every implementing organization will have an opportunity to launch the project in its own country. We are going to launch it next year in Tanzania but before that this year we are going to have a stakeholders workshop in September where we are going to invite all the stakeholders we have not yet met. Then we give a feedback from the launch. We also had a preparation meeting of all implementing partners in Addis Ababa in addition to this stakeholders workshop and we are going to invite other implementing organizations. So we are going to give a feedback on what will be happening. We already gave feedback  to our government but it will become very concrete in September when we will have our stakeholders workshop. So that they can understand now something is coming. So we are going to prepare them for this new initiative.