CAID Training For Youth Advocates

Children and Community Initiative for Development (CAID) organised a two-day training workshop  on   Advocating Youth and Children issues,  Held at the Girls Guide Training Centre in Kanifing from 18-19 May 2012.

The Executive Director of CAID, Mr. Ibrahim Ceesay, told his audience at the opening ceremony that the training and recruitment was designed for new-intakes to the Children Advocacy Newtwork (CAN), an advocacy based group under the auspices of  CAID.

The main aim of the training, as Ceesay highlighted, was to empower the participants with necessary skills and tools (leadership, advocacy, drama, child rights, public speaking, volunteer and activism), to be able to advocate strategically on all issues affecting children in The Gambia and promote mass information, education and communication that enable s children to express their needs and participate in making decisions affecting them at all levels.

Executive Director Ceesat recalled that since its inception in 2005, CAID had been implementing several youth led and community development projects in different parts on the country. He said CAID believes that children are the leaders in future makiing, and therefore they should be educated, empowered and equipped with necessary information and skills in circumventing problems affecting them at all  levels.

Ceesay also said in the Gambia, young people consist about 60 percent of the population, and in the nearest future there is hope of an increase.

He then charged that young people in the country, especially children, “have to be informed, educated, trained and empowered with life skills to be able to vanquish problems affecting them.

Throughout the world, Ceesay added, children are seen as a group that needs special protection, reasoning that, “because they are young and should remain unharmed until they are older and able to cope with life and what it throws at them”.

He,however, admitted that not all people agree that young people are special and should be playing instead of working, laughing instead of crying and learning instead of doing nothing.

“When things go wrong in the world- war, poverty, disease, or abuse is often children who suffer the most.

“Yet, all over the world, children are proving that they can be part of the solution, not just victims of the problem,” the CAID boss remarked.