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International Scouting Organizations
There are well over 500 separate national (or regional) Scouting associations in the world. Most have felt the need to create international Scouting organizations to set standards for Scouting and to coordinate activities among member associations. As a result, we know of six international Scouting organizations that serve most (but not all) of the world's national associations, plus a seventh international organization that is just for adults. The largest two organizations include the vast majority of the world's Scouts. Four other international organizations include just over 100 (mostly small) associations, and there are over 80 other small (mostly German) associations that are independent of any international organization. The international Scouting picture is complicated somewhat by the loss of the old distinction between a Scouting Movement for boys and a separate Scouting (or Guiding) Movement for girls. Since about 1970, the trend toward coed Scouting has accelerated, and today coed Scouting is the norm in many countries. This has created difficulties for the two largest international Scouting organizations: WOSM (World Organization of the Scout Movement), which formerly represented only male-only associations, and WAGGGS (World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts), which formerly represented only female-only associations. Today, WOSM counts over a million girls and young women among its members, and has changed its mission statements to reflect goals for "young people" rather than "boys and young men". WAGGGS still sets its mission goals in terms of "girls and young women", even though it counts a small number of boys and young men among its members (about 11 000). WOSM and WAGGGS have been discussing ways of uniting, but this process is likely to take many years. [The other four international organizations are all coed.] Why isn't everybody in WOSM or WAGGGS? Those associations that prefer not to belong to WOSM or WAGGGS tend to share several viewpoints:
Click on the icons below for more information and a list of all member associations in each of the six international Scouting organizations for youth and a seventh international organization for adults (with over 90 adult-only Scouting associations). Below the icons are additional links to all the non-aligned national Scouting associations that I have found and to our pages showing all the Scouting associations in every country of the world.
International Scouting Organizations
This table summarizes the totals for the six international organizations with youth members plus the non-aligned associations. The 52 associations and 4 federations that belong to both WOSM and WAGGGS are counted in each group's total, but are counted only once for the grand total.
Fragmented Scouting. While most countries typically have two or three Scouting associations, there are six countries where Scouting is incredibly fragmented:
Here are links to our pages that describe the many interesting aspects of a Scouting world that is probably more varied and dynamic than you thought:
Last Revision to This Page: 9 October 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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