Youth as a Catalyst for Peace: Helping Youth Develop the Vision, Skills, and Behaviors to Promote Peace

This brochure presents experiences and lessons learned from The Academy for Educational Development (AED) in working towards promoting peacebuilding through

youth development. According to the publication, AED has found that youth are more likely to avoid violence and engage in peacebuilding behaviour if they have access

to opportunities that enable them to have:

• a strong sense of self-esteem
• solid connections to their own community
• a sense of empowerment to make decisions affecting their own future
• adequate opportunities to get to know youth who are different than themselves
• access to programmes to improve leadership, communication,and basic conflict resolution skills
• avenues for job training and/or employment

A number of AED projects are provided as case studies:

• Decisions is an 11-part television series designed to present issues concerning democracy and the free market to Polish youth in a captivating and entertaining manner. In addition, the series encouraged young people to participate more actively, assertively, and confidently in democratic institutions and to vote as informed citizens on issues that affect them.
• Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) and Boys Reaching Out (BRO) are youth leadership development camps in Armenia that used interactive games, roleplaying, and discussions to encourage participants to build leadership skills, set goals, and taking a more active role in their education, health care decisions, and communities.
• Community Action Investment Programme (CAIP) in Kazakhstan brings local activists and citizens together to identify, prioritise, and solve their social and economic needs through the implementation of community projects that address tensions or conflicts within a community.
• Peace Media in Sri Lanka reaches youth audiences with peace building themes such as ethnic group relations and reconciliation.
• Programa Para o Futuro (PPF) is a workforce development programme for at-risk youth in Brazil that integrates information and communication technologies (ICT) training and employability activities.

Lessons Learned

• AED has learned that the most successful
  programmes have built in opportunities to take advantage of and build on this energy. Conversely, a failure to channel youths' creativity and energy can build (or reinforce) youth resentments and skepticism.
• Similarly, AED has found that when youth are directly involved in designing and implementing their own programmes, they are more likely to 'own' and derive meaningful benefits from the programmes.
• Youth programmes (including peacebuilding programmes) are generally more successful when skill building is combined with recreational or social activities.
• Particularly when they continue to take youths' needs into account, long-term programmes (six months to one year) tend to be more successful than short-term
  programmes at generating youth commitment to peace and encouraging peace-building behaviours.
• AED has worked to ensure gender balance in programming, including both female and male youth, particularly in conflict and post-conflict environments.
• While education and employment tend to reduce youth involvement in violence, educational opportunities in the absence of work opportunities can also lead to
  youth violence. It is thus important to design youth training activities with employment generation and sustainability in mind.
• Particularly in settings where ethnic or religious cleavages run deep, it is often more effective to bring youth together on completely neutral ground. This provides
  them with the opportunity to face new ideas and approaches with a completely fresh perspective, away from any other social pressures they might experience
  closer to home.
• In some of AED’s most effective youth peace-building approaches and programmes conflict resolution and peacebuilding have been implicit, rather than explicit, objectives. It is generally easier to draw youth into discussions of immediate needs (such as jobs/ employment, skills, basic needs) than of principles (such as conflict transformation, peace-building, democracy).The key to an effective programme is getting youth from different walks of life together over time with a common objective and positive mentors. The peacebuilding often takes care of itself.