Motoring from War to Peace

Map of Africa with the countries Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia & Cote d'Ivoire highlighted

GCRF Funding Cycle
2020-21

Principal Investigator
Jaremy McMullin

ODA countries
Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire

Sustainable Development Goals
Goal 1, Goal 3, Goal 5, Goal 8, Goal 10, Goal 11, Goal 16, Goal 17

To what extent can cross-border engagement of conflict-affected youth promote community security, social cohesion, and well-being in the Mano River Basin, especially given its regional context of ongoing conflict fragility and economic vulnerability amplified by the coronavirus pandemic? This project proposes to expand previous impact generation work with conflict-affected youth in Liberia to six vulnerable border communities in Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

Its objectives are, firstly, to map ongoing vulnerabilities and analyse youth-led community response to them and, secondly, to design, implement, and evaluate youth-focused cross-border engagement. That engagement will entail conflict resolution training and structured, facilitated cross-border community dialogue, to provide a forum for border communities to bring young men and women together to share and learn from successful, youth-generated strategies in the areas of gender-based violence, disease prevention, social cohesion, and sustainable livelihoods. Participants will be conflict-affected young men in the commercial motorcycling sector (which employs hundreds of thousands of young men in the region) and young women active in market networks, plus community leaders, police, and border police in each area.

The project also supports 27 days of Pl field research and a dissemination event bringing ODA collaborators and Mano River Union officials into dialogue with local community leaders.

Associated SFC GCRF funded projects on the St Andrews research portal

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