About Us

In the abundance of youth groups within the church and across the African continent, why another one? What could possibly justify the creation of another youth organization?

What could be the rationale?

These pertinent questions receive their basic response in the statement below:

Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.

This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult adverse situations or inevitable changes in our plans. It invites us to accept the tension between fullness and limitation, and to give priority to time. One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back.

Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constant expanding chain, with no possibility of return. What we need then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.

Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, nos. 222-223

IYNIGO- Ignatian Youth Networks Initiating Generational outcomes– derives its raison D’ être from this key principle of the Holy Father, Pope Francis. A youth organization springing forth from and the service of the church, specifically situated in Africa, IYNIGO aspires to be an assembly of dynamic young people who “give priority to actions which generate new processes in the society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to a point where they bear fruit in significant historical events.”

The name IYNIGO (pronounced: [e-nee-go]) intentionally calls to mind the founder of the society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)-whose original Spanish name was Iñigo-because it is the spirituality and ethos of St. Ignatius that animate this group; hence, its principal identification as Ignatian.

Two images depict how members of IYNIGO Seek to achieve their commitment to the agenda of social transformation of their communities, countries, and the African continent: