Pacesetter Youth Network (PYN) is a promotes young people starting and supporting community peacebuilding and community based conflict solving mechanisms in Zimbabwe.
The vision of the organization is a sustainably empowered, peaceful and development-oriented Zimbabwean youth. To that end, their mission is to create an environment conducive for the betterment of youth and nurturing a culture of peace through peace education in Zimbabwe.
Their core values remain total commitment, participation, peace, integrity, honesty, accountability, transparency, efficiency and quality service. Among their objectives they include empowering the marginalized youth to realise their full potential in building peace within their communities; to sensitise youth on their role in community development; sharing knowledge and experiences with youths on peace, human rights, leadership and development experiences; nurturing a culture of tolerance and understanding among youths; raising awareness on issues of Gender, HIV/AIDS and Climate change; capacitating youths in conflict prevention, management, transformation, and leadership skills; capacitating youth activist to engage in non-violence in order to achieve lasting societal transformation through dialogue; and promoting and ensuring environmental sustainability.
In executing this mission, Pacesetters Youth Network ensures youth mainstreaming and empowerment, in order to achieve sustainable peace and development in Zimbabwe. It achieves this through training, networking as well as capacity development. To create an environment conducive for the betterment of youth and nurturing a culture of non-violence, PYN encourages youth to take up leadership in peace education.
The organization uses sport as a vehicle of bringing different groups together, in order to maximise on the energy that defines youth to foster competition and cooperation in addressing conflict positively. Other methods such as training, exchange visits, endogenous and exogenous methods of handling issues that have led to conflicts and confrontation are also used.
They also use Conflict transformation techniques to investigate the underlying causes of conflict, and stress the ways in which social structures, organizations, and institutions are built, sustained, and changed by conflict. This technique explores the ways people build and organize social, economic, and institutional relationships to meet basic human needs and provide access to resources and decision-making. They also use the Hands-on sustainable livelihoods technique. It is unfathomable to most people that in this world of plenty, there are millions of people without life’s necessities, such as clean water, access to healthcare, adequate food and housing. At this midpoint to the deadline for achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the poverty reduction report card is mixed. PYN believe that it is so because of the lack of a global commitment to reduce poverty.
