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YOUTH AWARENESS PERSPECTIVE
The YOUTH AWARENESS PERSPECTIVE (YAP), is a proposed proposal /program that will target the youth in local high schools
to find out their general attitudes to life and in particular the problems affecting them, and by tackling the issues they
raise at the peer, professional, and international levels, to embark on finding appropriate solutions.
The youth of today are under immense and intense pressure from various fronts: educational, social, economic, cultural. At school, they are toiling through a taxing system that is constantly being reviewed haphazardly, while at home they have parents who--because of economic and professional /career pressures--are scarcely available. Cultural changes and social pressures have put local traditions at loggerheads with new lifestyles. Drugs, alcohol, and other substance abuse have surpassed all previous limits, while indiscipline and crime are now clearly manifest in schools, homes, and the streets . Promiscuous and irresponsible sexual trends are on the rise in the youth. The most disquieting point is that all the above social ills are being committed by the youth and it is frightening and disheartening to think of the possible continuation of these trends to the current youth who are the leaders and citizens of tomorrow and to their own children.
It is a fact that the youth of today are getting deeply involved in more and more of the various social evils bedeviling our beloved nation of Kenya, with incidents of arson in schools, indiscipline in schools, homes, and the wider society, delinquent crimes, drug abuse, high school drop-out rates, and a myriad of other problems both affecting the youth and perpetrated by them. This is happening so much that the incidents are taken for granted as the norm of the day, times are hard and if so and so cannot afford to take their children to school, if that girl has to go into prostitution to earn a living, if the economy is so bad that employers have to use child labor, if teachers can't control their students and suffer the school to be burnt, then what can I do? I have enough problems of my own.
Why the youth? By addressing the problems faced by the youth, we address the problems of the future. The project hails from the belief that prevention is better than cure and what is the best place for prevention other than the youth? As much as we appreciate other contributing factors to this problems--such as the current economic slump, ministerial apathy, mismanagement in schools, among others--we believe that by targeting the youth we will be effectively working at the base of the educational structure, and by gathering their views we shall be able to set up a statistical database that will be used by all stake holders.
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