Meeting Habitat for Humanity

A house in Yerevan, Armenia

I have met Lucija Popovska from Habitat for Humanity Regional office for the Europe and Central Asia in Bratislava today. Lucija understood immediately my concern about the connection between youth and development and humanitarian aid and raised some issues to think about.

Do you know, what impact do natural disasters and war have on youth? Young people participate in wars themselves many times; not only in Africa, but also in Kosovo the average age of soldiers was far under 30. One of many worrying examples showing that youth-specific policy is needed.

Humanitarian aid is generally aimed to 3 areas and thus places suffering from poverty, post-war and post-natural disasters. Development aid is in contrary mainly about building economic system and fighting corruption.

The objectives of Habitat for Humanity are mobilizing resources and enabling access to affordable housing, which is done in 3 ways:
1. Building/renovating houses and providing resources to do that
2. Mobilizing resources and people – volunteers, donations and loans (micro-loans, youth entrepreneurship)
3. Changing the housing policies on the national level, advocacy

Housing policies are rather poor in “new Europe” – let’s exclude Western Europe now - housing as such is normally cut between more authorities, as land, social affairs, Youth department and other. On the top of that, housing policies are rarely youth-friendly. In Hungary, a change of these policies has been proposed, hopefully it will move to a good direction in a short time. And Hungary is not so far from Slovakia.

If you want to know more about Habitat's activities, visit their website here. Big thanks to Lucija for her time!!