D’kar village (where we are based) has an estimated population of 2000 and is located in the Ghanzi district of western Botswana. For many centuries, it has been home to people of San origin (commonly known as bushmen), which has attracted numerous tourists and foreign visitors to admire their traditional way of life, their unique cultures and their natural talents and skills in art and print works, craft work, their production of exotic leather items, wild-foods gathering, and particularly, their talents in dances, game-hunting and game tracking. However, poverty remains the predominant local problem as the community members are putting in much effort into creating opportunities for a better standard of living through, for example, government empowerment schemes. The same scenario applies to all other communities where San people live.

San Youth Network ha been active in trying to empower the San youth in a plethora of development work. The efforts we have made in impacting our San communities has been to ensure that they access scholarships for their tertiary education, workshop and capacity development programmes, sharing of up to date information, advocacy work, responsding to Climate Change. Of recent, since the impact of the global pandemic (COVID-19), that has devastated many lifestyles, San Youth Network has made efforts to try many ways of mitigation, including donating soaps and hand sanitizers and donating washable face masks to the san communities that we serve.

Since the pandemic, the situation on the living conditions of the San has been exacerbated by a number of measures or regulations put in place to monitor the potential spread. Health information and advice issued by the government and maintream media as well as some NGOs are produced primarily in Tswana and do not take into consideration the particularities of San culture and the conditions under which our people live. Measures such as social distancing, self-isolation and washing hands must be implemented within the context of the realities of San life.

As essential service providers, we try to make sure that we reach out to many people as much as possible to ensure that they also get the help they need. Some of this help include donations of health based products and food baskets as well as relevent information on the current affairs with regards to the COVID-19. The reason we are sourcing donations from around the world is for us to purchase a vehicle (s) in order to reach out to many consituencies that we serve through outreach activities. To this day, we have been limited due to our lack of mobility and this has taken a toll to our work.

For San Youth Network, the founders of the Organisation are from D'Kar and are San themselves. The struggles we see happening to our people are the same that we experience and we try with our hearts to respond to them on a daily base. This is a legitimate and an authentic way of making change that matters....because we matter, we make change that matters.