Making the International Voluntary Services Cycle Bigger and Stronger via Pentagon Analysis

For the first time in the history of Southern Africa Workcamps Cooperation that, a meeting was graced by a delegate from Angola. SAWC extended invitation to Animar a Youth led organisation based in Luanda for the annual technical meeting hosted by AJOV in Beline, Mozambique. Animar is organising community services projects in Luanda with a strong focus on children and youths. Projects organised by Animar are voluntary inspired. WomenEmpower a women and youth organisation based in Maputo also joined the meeting, it was inspiring to have them on board since they also brought with them community services projects from a different perspective from our traditional ways of doing voluntary services. WomenEmpower employs physio-social support and social entrepreneurship amongst the marginalised women and youths in and around Maputo. The District Administrator from the government welcome all the delegates from Southern Africa and he under scored the critical and crucial role played by voluntary inspired organisation from all over the world. He challenged SAWC members to consider a critical turn in social development landscape by embracing private and public partnership (ppps) as a way of making international voluntary services cycle bigger and stronger, hence reaching more people who are in need of our services as development practitioners

The Technical meeting covered a number of issues affecting the regional IVS movement. In order to address and turn some of the challenges into opportunities. The Organisational Pentagon systematic approach to organisational development in the network was employed as a way of checking the health of the regional network, due to time constrain, the entire pentagon process was not covered, but the area covered challenged members present to view their respective organisations and SAWC in general with a different eyes. “According to Neila the youngest delegate (19years) the whole Pentagon process was challenging, complicated, difficult but interesting,” The Pentagon also assisted the regional structure to identify three critical needs which needs to be addressed like yesterday, so as to improve the health of the regional structure. The three areas which recorded very low are communication, functioning and sustainability. In order to address these challenges, the technical team agreed to come out with a training with strong bias on communication and team building strategies, since mutual communication is the heart and soul of network-based organisation.

Group photo with the District Administrator for Beline District

Meeting proceedings: Dalva presenting WomenEmpower