Once a Scout...

Skills for life

In Bungere, a rural village in Burundi, East Africa, many young people grow up facing unemployment and few opportunities to build a future. Without skills or economic pathways, confidence and prospects narrow quickly.

Ticket to Life, a global initiative from World Scouting, is writing a new story for young people. Providing them with practical business skills, cooperative structures, and a community that believes in them, Scouting is preparing a generation of changemakers in Burundi.

The project in Bungere has run two training programmes. Cooperative leaders learn financial management, participatory governance, and how to plan income-generating activities. Young peer educators learn how to communicate, facilitate, and bring other young people into local development initiatives. It’s a self-perpetuating design, with skills passed from one person to the next long after the project ends. 

One of their main vehicles to deliver this change is micro enterprises. Through a vegetable farm and a mushroom cultivation cooperative, young people who had never been in formal employment are learning how to run businesses from every angle. 

So far, the project has reached 185 vulnerable young people. 

Cilliaque Banyenzako, a Scout who completed the programme and now works alongside its young participants, points to something harder to measure. 

Before Ticket to Life, he says, young people without schooling would come to the training centre and simply sit. "They spent their entire day doing nothing." Ticket to Life changed that: "They got trained to get out of the life of waiting to beg. Now, they got trained to work." 

Millions more are waiting 

The young people who need Scouting most, those furthest from school, opportunity, and people who believe in them, are often the furthest from Scouting, too. 

World Scouting’s initiatives like Ticket to Life exist to close that gap. And they work: the skills are proven, the model is replicable, and the demand is vast. 

What determines how many young people benefit is the support behind it. 

"I encourage other leaders around the world,” says Kwizera, “to mentor other young people who haven't gone to school, because it makes us feel like we belong in a community." 

Leadership in Scouting takes many forms. For some, it means showing up in Burundi. For others, it means making sure someone can. 

Your support today will help young people like Kwizera develop skills for tomorrow.