Overview
Duration: 24 Months
Focused states: Bauchi and Gombe states
Partners: Young Leaders Network (YLN)
Search, in collaboration with Young Leaders Network is implementing a 24-month project titled: Nigerian Youth Collaborative Action for Religious Engagement. The project seeks to empower and promote collaboration among diverse youths in Nigeria, particularly in Bauchi, Plateau, and Gombe states to advance inter-religious tolerance and freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). The project will foster youth leadership to influence the state-level policy environment to be more inclusive and conducive for inter-religious tolerance and religious freedom.
The project’s overall goal is to empower diverse youth in Bauchi, Plateau, and Gombe States to advance inter-religious tolerance and FoRB, and the activities are specifically designed to strengthen relationships amongst youths in the target states to collaboratively work against violations of religious freedom and improve their capacities to utilize digital skills to promote FoRB.
Objective
(OB1) To foster youth leadership in influencing the state-level policy environment to be more inclusive and conducive to inter-religious tolerance and religious freedom.
(OB2) To support youth-led online initiatives that further inter-religious tolerance and religious freedom.
Context
Across Nigeria, violence, including violence along religious lines, is on the rise. As insecurity grows, religious intolerance is becoming increasingly acute: in 2017, 82% of Nigerians reported ‘never’ experiencing religious discrimination, compared to just 68% in 2021. Bauchi State is an area of growing concern over recent incidents of religiously motivated violence (including arson and violent attacks in May 2022) and alarming low levels of interreligious trust.
To its south, Plateau State has a decades-long history of religiously- motivated violence, but also a number of past FoRB interventions (some supported by DRL) that can serve as a model to prevent an escalation of violence in neighboring Bauchi. In neighboring Gombe, intercommunal violence is a decades-long challenge, with a long history of communal clashes across Billiri, Kaltungo, Balanga, and Shongom Local Government Areas.
Though pervasive stereotypes assume that youth are responsible for violent extremism and criminality, youth in Plateau have worked together across religious dividing lines to build peace and tolerance. They are thus well-positioned to positively influence community norms in at-risk contexts such as Bauchi.
However, youth face a lack of strategic networks and underrepresentation in religious and policy decision-making, which act as barriers to the achievement of their full potential as religious peacebuilders and activists, including in the digital space.
Approach
The proposed project takes a youth-led, intergenerational approach that leverages both innovative digital peacebuilding techniques and evidence-based best practices to generate sustainable change at the institutional and social-behavioral levels.
The design is based on lessons learned from Search’s work on religious engagement and youth empowerment, which have demonstrated the potential for youth to foster peace if they have stronger networks, mentorship and support, and the ability to define their own needs and priorities.
The project will leverage models of success from Search’s religious engagement initiatives in Plateau for expansion to Bauchi and Gombe through peer learning. To address rising levels of tension and violence associated with social media, and also to harness the power of online tools to reshape narratives and norms, young influencers from Bauchi and Plateau will be empowered to lead digital peacebuilding.
