Youth Zone

Young people in Development

PSO Youth Zone is a programme specially developed for PSO members and their partner organisations. PSO Youth Zone offers members and their partners the opportunity to increase young people's expertise and to support local organisations.

In 2000, PSO developed the Youth Zone programme to stimulate the involvement of young professionals in capacity building processes in developing countries. As PSO does not have direct contact with partner organisations in the South, the Youth Zone programme can be seen as a facilitating framework, both financially and content wise.

The programme proved to meet a strongly felt need, both with civil society organisations in the North and the South as well as with the young professionals themselves. They applied for the limited number of vacancies en masse. Over the years the programme has grown to an average of fifty individual placements and another fifty young people involved in short term group exchanges.

The Southern Youth Zone policy was introduced by PSO in March 2008, to stimulate PSO members to involve more young professionals in the South to work on capacity development in the South.

Information about Northern Youth Zone is accesible in Dutch. Information about Southern Youth Zone is presented in this section.

The Southern Youth Zone policy distinguishes itself from the current Youth Zone programme, among other things, by the fact that alongside the receiving partner, a sending partner is also involved. The receiving partner is the organisation the young professional is to work for.

The sending partner organisation is the organisation that the young professional worked for before starting the placement.

The young professional is assumed to stay in contact with the sending partner organisation during the placement and to preferably return to this organisation afterwards. This way, the sending partner organisation will contribute to and learn from the intervention.

It is envisaged that a (stronger) relationship will be established between both partners that might also continue after the placement has been completed. Although PSO assumes that both partners will benefit from the placement, in practice the idea for the placement of a young professional will come from either the sending or the receiving partner.

Read the policy of Southern Youth Zone