Teenage peace brigade project weekly progress

Dear All: hope my email finds you in a good health and spirit

Apologies for being too late to update you about my Teenage peace brigade project, on those days when I was trying to start the project, some conditions forced me to travel to the capital city Addis Ababa for visa and then to Amsterdam, the Netherlands for training again one more time I would like to ask apologies both from the coordinators and participants. Accepted? Let me continue…….

Before informing you what we have done this week, let me brief you about Teenage peace brigade project, since forgotten diaries project is helping us to transform conflicts in to peace and I have a strong belief that this initiative should be applied at community/grass root levels then I decided to introduce peaceful conflict resolution tools and techniques to children and teenage in my community. Sp that they can mobilize their peers, the school communities and the society as a whole.

To introduce these tools and techniques we will establish peace brigades at 6 schools and training will be given to nominated leaders of these brigades then to reach, the school community, partner organizations and the society at large; public debates and discussion forums will be organized, we have identified partner organizations that can work with us to delver this project effectively.

Scaling up best learning of this project is the main thing we hope to achieve in addition to making this initiative successful even after the end of the project implementation period.

Thanks to Youth Action for Change and the funding agency, we launched my project this week the first thing I did was establishing a steering committee that can control the over all activities of the project, members of the committee were represented from Amhare youth Association, Green and Wealthy Ethiopia, schools selected for the project and local government representatives, they are five in number. The reason I prefer to establish this committee was to show transparency and share responsibility in the community and to avoid any possible interruption of the project if I am not available in the future by any means.

The committee selected 30 of which 20 are children and the rest 10 are teenage to take part in the training to be held for 6 days which will start by the coming Monday, each school represented 5 students 40 % of trainees are girls to ensure gender balance.

The training will be given by an experienced expert and it will cover major topics such as peace building, conflict resolution and club management and methodologies are lecture, group work, exercise and plenary session.

Glad to read your comments

Amare Abebaw, Ethiopia