Support Youth to build Peace in Nigeria

New Era Educational and Charitable Support Foundation (NEEDCSI), with support from International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD) has completed the implementation of ‘Building Bridges Across Faiths: Intercommunity Dialogue for Peace  Project in Nigeria.

The project was designed to address the immediate and underlying factors that foster the growth of religious extremism, leading to religiously motivated violence directed at individuals, groups, religious sites and places of worship, especially in Northern Nigeria. The Project is anchored in a human security approach, which builds a conceptual link between human security and development i.e., a people-centred, comprehensive, context-specific and prevention-oriented response. Project implementation involved a mixture of prevention and response-oriented activities that focused on trust building, community cohesion, solidarity, interreligious harmony and peaceful co-existence for local communities to transcend cultural and faith divides and co-exist as brothers and sisters without wars.

Participants selected from conflict areas were engaged in inter-faith activities as a way to expose doctrinal fallacies and areas where religion has been manipulated to serve political ends and to justify violence against the “Other”. Project participants socialized across boundaries of culture and faith while also experiencing volunteerism from a faith-based community of youths, educators and experts. Additionally, the project encouraged youths and families to live a life of strong moral value, recognizing that the peace of our communities, our nation and the world begins with the peace of the individual.

Project activities included one day Capacity Building Workshop for Religious Leaders, CSOs and several other important stakeholders, gatekeepers and strategic partners. Target-specific Information, Education and Communication (IEC) Materials such as T-Shirts, banners, handbills, posters supported behaviour change communication, public awareness and education, complemented by a strong advocacy and stakeholder engagement component led by our Organization’s Advocacy and Stakeholder Engagement Team.