Support Youth to build Peace in Nigeria

Based on Contract Number 83414821, New Era Educational and Charitable Support Foundation (NEEDCSI) has completed the implementation of ‘Building Bridges Across Faiths: Intercommunity Dialogue for Peace in Nigeria’ Project. The project was funded by PaRD through GIZ Nigeria Office.

A total of 50 Leaders of FBOs, CBOs and NGOs were trained at a one-day Capacity Building Workshop organized in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria. The Workshop provided practical, challenging “how-to” tools for participants to experience peace and to work together, as brothers and sisters without wars, to create sustainable communities, beginning with faith that works in real life.

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 coexist as brothers and sisters without wars.

The project specifically targeted two of the 17 SDGs, in ensuring that by 2030, all the people of the earth enjoy peace and prosperity. The two SDGs targeted include Goal 16- Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions and Goal 17- Partnerships for the Goals. As Goal 16 says, there cannot be sustainable development anywhere on earth, without peace, stability, human rights and effective governance. For Goal 17, the SDGs can only be realized with strong partnerships and cooperation, whether local or global. The project also supported PaRD’s first strategic objective of fostering safe space for dialogue, by creating the platform for increased citizens’ participation, networking and knowledge, while also seeking to explore how the different religions, faiths and spiritual traditions and groups, working together in an atmosphere of cooperative creativity, can contribute to peace and development.

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.

Links:

• PaRD FoRB Nigeria