We recently completed a year-long project in the Zinder region of Niger to strengthen young people’s ability to prevent conflict and encourage them to promote inter-community understanding. We also helped the Ministry of Youth (MoY) strengthen its capacity to engage youth organizations and support their initiatives for peace.
The project began by reaching out to local and national authorities, youth organizations, and other stakeholders in the three communes of Zinder city, and the rural communes of Takeita, Dogo, and Gouré. There, we trained representatives from youth associations and the MoY in conflict management, youth leadership, and restitution techniques. In order to encourage people to spread the knowledge and skills they learned during these trainings, we teamed up with the trained youth and MoY representatives and organized restitution sessions aimed at members of youth associations, gangs, informal fada (youth clubs), local authorities, elders, traditional/religious leaders, and community radio station staff.
We succeeded in training 172 youth, including more than 40 young women. Participants came from various socioeconomic backgrounds, ranging from university students to illiterate gang members, and were of different ethnicities, ages, and institutional affiliations. Another 806 young people, 10% of them women, participated in restitution sessions organized in partnership with the MoY field agents. Using a participatory approach involving a combination of lectures, Q&A sessions, full group debates, and small group discussions, participants shared their thoughts on new concepts and discovered how to apply them in their own context. After our training, a reformed gang leader requested an extra restitution session for the students of a vocational school in Zinder.
The youth we trained successfully organized 27 activities, including football matches, dance festivals, theater performances, community sanitization/clean-up efforts, and community dialogues/town hall meetings, all designed to unify the fractured communities in our six target zones. These events also strengthened the role of youth associations through their continuing partnership with MoY and gave them the confidence to be agents of social transformation and peacebuilding. In response to this project, one of the largest youth organizations decided to reestablish itself as a cooperative, aiming at creating a union of youth cooperatives which will partner with regional authorities to organize and implement micro-projects.
We are now planning to consolidate the success of this project in 2014 by continuing to work with the beneficiaries of the first phase and taking our programs into rural areas of Magaria and Matameye.
This project is made possible with support from the National Endowment for Democracy.