 violent conflict. They include the vulnerability of youth, the violent and often extremist ideologies and movement movements, and also the vulnerability of youth including not just young men but also young women to being coerced into participation in violence as we're seeing again today in South Sudan quite tragically. Responding to these trends and figuring out how to be effective in countering them is an urgent concern for peace builders in the field of conflict resolution. It's going to be the focus of our discussion this morning and when we also recognize that definitions of youth are quite flexible and often range from preteens to those up to their 30s and that violent conflict is more prevalent in societies where majorities of the population are below the age of 21 if not younger then I think the scale of these challenges becomes even more daunting and helps to understand why programming and interventions focusing on youth and violence are the focus of growing attention from researchers practitioners and officials and have become as well a topic of particular interest and concern to a number of programs at USIP where several of our centers are involved in programming in this area. To help us take stock this morning of where we are in responding to the epidemic of youth violence around the world we have representatives from each of these different communities on our panel including I'm very pleased to say Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard who will offer opening remarks. Assistant Secretary Richard is uniquely well positioned to address this topic. She is Assistant Secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees in Migration. She has served as Director of the Secretary's Office of Resources Plans and Policy at the State Department. She has also held positions at the Council on Foreign Relations and was a part of the team that helped to create the International Crisis Group a group with which I have particular affection. She's widely published on issues ranging from the International Coordination of Foreign Assistance to combating terrorism, strategies to make foreign aid more cost-effective and on specific humanitarian crises from Haiti to South Sudan to Afghanistan. Assistant Secretary Richards is going to give us an overview of key issues concerning youth in transition, violence and peace building. She will speak for about five to seven minutes. Unfortunately Assistant Secretary Richards is not going to be able to stay with us this morning to take any questions. Following her remarks she will need to return to the pressing business that she deals with at the Department of State. But it's with great pleasure that I welcome Assistant Secretary Richards to address us this morning. Thank you so much. I was asked if I needed a car to come here this morning back to the State Department. I said no I think I can walk down the block to the US Institute of Peace. And of course I'm very glad to do so and to be here this morning with such an impressive panel and so many friends in the audience and thank you Steve for that kind introduction. As you may have surmised from my bio I have spent much of my career trying to get help to people who are dealing with calamities, displacement and suffering and I have traveled extensively to the world's hot spots both in this job and my immediate past job as a Vice President International Rescue Committee and I'm not a person at this point who is easily shocked. But nothing prepared me for the reality that confronted me late last year when I visited the Shire refugee camps in Ethiopia and I was shocked because there were hundreds and hundreds of children everywhere I looked. Young people, adolescents and children you can pour over the data movements and vulnerability persons of concern you can know that at least half of those displaced by violence are young and that most of the artrians fleeing to camps in Ethiopia are young but it is another thing to see it. They cross a border where guards are ordered to shoot to kill. They leave parents in homes knowing they can probably never return but they may be attacked and exploited along the way or captured, returned, imprisoned and tortured. They flee a life of poverty and the prospect of compulsory military service without end and so when we think of compulsory military service we're thinking of older teenagers. So imagine my shock when I saw kids of 11, 12, 13 years old. Many don't stay long. Instead they consider the camps just a way station and set off on a perilous journey north hoping to reach Israel or northern Africa and cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Some of what I saw in Shirei seemed familiar. The boys dorms were spare and the girls were decorated with posters on the walls and tidy little arrangements of bottles and cosmetics. It made me smile to think of what teenage girls everywhere have in common. The next day an Ethiopian colleague suggested that these may have been gifts from men who had prayed upon these teenagers and I felt terrible about what I had just seen. What has struck me again and again in my travels is that certain desires seem universal. Young men and women everywhere want to be safe, educated and respected. They want a fair shot at a better future. Eritrean youth risk death over and over again to chase this dream. I've also remember visiting northern Uganda during the height of the Lord's Resistance Army rampages through the countryside and how children would walk at night from rural areas into the cities to stay safe and to not be abducted and to get a chance to do their homework. In Central America today, children set out on a perilous journey north to come here to the United States and this is an issue that is gripped the Obama administration and trying to help these children who show up at our borders if they succeed in getting through the rest of Central America and Mexico. It's not surprising that young people will languish when their dream is snatched away. The Mercy Corps report on Syria documents what can happen to young people when society is brutally unraveled and I'm so glad to see Neil Kinney Geyer and Andrea Koppel and Anne Vaughn and others here today from Mercy Corps, some of my favorite colleagues. As you know in your report, girls suffer from isolation, boys feel hopeless and humiliated. As many have pointed out, an entire generation has been impoverished, traumatized and risks being lost in part because they're not getting an education. A recent report from UNRA, the U.N. Development Program and the Syrian Center for Policy Research warns that more than half of all school-aged children in Syria, 51.8%, no longer attends school. That figure is much higher, above 90% in al-Rakha and Aleppo. 45% of Syrians have been driven from their homes and a quarter of them, more than 2.8 million people have become refugees. In Turkey, an estimated 70% of refugee children are not enrolled in school. And in Iraq, less than 5% of Syrian refugees are receiving formal education. While they may be physically safe outside Syria's borders, youth, along with their families, are often dispossessed and vulnerable. Youth report that their friends need to marry older men because their families cannot afford to feed them. Mothers complain that their kids are working long hours for meager wages, sometimes becoming families' sole breadwinners because of legal barriers that make it hard for parents to find jobs. Around the world, the Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration that I am privileged to have is helping young people who flee conflict and persecution. Just last week in Lebanon, Secretary Kerry announced more than $290 million in additional humanitarian funding for Syria, bringing the United States' total humanitarian assistance package to more than $2 billion. Most of this pays for emergency supplies and life-saving interventions. But we also try to meet the longer-term needs of Syria's millions of refugee children. A few days ago, a new school and playground opened in Qilis, a city along the Turkey-Syria border where refugees now outnumber the host community. It is the first of at least a dozen schools we are helping to fund that will open soon and provide a formal education to refugees. At the community and youth centers, we support young people who can socialize so, do artwork and play sports and get psychological counseling. They can also get job training and referrals and take classes in English, Arabic and Turkish. On my most recent trip to Amman, I visited the Basma Center and I stopped in the computer clubhouse where young Jordanian Syrians and Iraqis were learning to use computers and digital video studio equipment. I met a precocious 13-year-old Syrian boy named Musa who really, really wanted to show me the video he had made. It featured his own poems about his love for his country, interspersed with pictures of Syria and the war, and he hopes to be a cameraman someday. And I hope that he achieves that goal. We know that young people do benefit from our programs because we hear their stories. At a community center that my bureau funds out to Nozu Turkey, our staff heard from a girl named Damani whose home was destroyed by a barrel bomb. Her father was too psychologically traumatized to work. Her mother tried to restart her hairdressing business but could not get clients. And one reason for that was that their apartment was too dingy and unwelcoming. Amani, who was 14, was about to be married off to a much older man in exchange for a stipend her family could live on. Our community center used special funds to fix up a room in the apartment so Amani's mother could earn money cutting hair. And Amani is now taking classes in the center with her friends. And her life is beginning to resemble that of a normal life. Under the UN's no-loss generation initiative funding from donor governments and philanthropies has climbed and programs like ours have multiplied but the needs are vast and of course there is no end in sight. Syria is just one of the mega crises we are confronting. Conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan have each displaced over a million people. Displaced in vulnerable populations in countries ranging from Colombia to Burma to the West Bank need and receive my bureau's help as well. We can never fully restore what is lost when young people are engulfed in violent conflict. Children and teenagers have seen families hacked to death. They have seen homes flattened and villages burned. They have been thrust into poverty and separated from the communities that protected them and taught them the difference between right and wrong. They have grievances and they can be vulnerable to exploitation. But we know that the vast majority of those we help are not perpetrators of violence but victims of circumstances, horrible and cruel circumstances. We help them not because we hope that it will steer them away from extremism but because we are tasked with saving lives and easing suffering. As humanitarians and representatives of the American people we do not see how it could be any other way. Our work depends on access to the places and people in jeopardy. To reach these people the groups we fond and work with, like Mercy Corps, adhere to internationally humanitarian principles and are independent and impartial in serving those in need. We must distribute meals, tents and plastic sheeting, treat injuries and vaccinate children. We help meet basic needs and we think this can help protect displaced people including young people from those who might otherwise hurt or use them. We try to shield and empower especially vulnerable groups including women and girls. When violence and chaos first erupts the risk of gender-based violence spikes. To prevent and address this we launched our save from the start initiative last year and plan to expand it this year. It has allowed international organizations to deploy staff and develop programs specifically designed to protect women and girls right from the onset of a crisis and not delay. After emergencies we confront longer-term needs. When young people are displaced for months and years, when they cannot go home, we do our best to offer them some sense of normalcy, community, purpose and hope. We are doing this all over the world from Afghanistan to Colombia to Burma. We try to aid and protect young people and give them something productive and sometimes even fun to do. The questions that many of you on this panel in this audience are examining are fascinating and the answers are important. When young people's lives are derailed by conflicts some do turn to violence. The cost to them, their communities and their countries can be staggering. Our responses should be shaped by accurate data, sound analysis and realistic expectations about what we can do to prevent this. I want to commend Mercy Corps and the US Institute of Peace for focusing attention on this need and providing an opportunity for experts to share their findings and insights. We at the State Department of the Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration look forward to learning from you and I want to thank you again for inviting me here today so that I could help welcome you to this important discussion. Thanks very much. Thank you Secretary Richard. I think that was a really terrific combination of some of the higher level questions that we'll be tackling on the panel noting some of the trends taking place on the ground on a somewhat more immediate level but also giving us a sense of how some of the individuals who are really struggling to deal with youth who are struggling to deal with conditions of conflict are trying to manage their lives in ways that open up better opportunities for them despite the difficulty of their circumstances. Really very, very helpful to have us in setting our stage. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. We're going to get started now with presentations from our three panelists. I'm going to introduce them now and ask each of them to speak for about 10 minutes. Their presentations will be followed by a period of moderated conversation that we will keep brief because our hope is to move as quickly as possible once they've finished their remarks to an open discussion in which you all will have a chance to participate. Our first speaker is Mark Summers. We're very, very pleased to have Mark return to USIP. Mark is an internationally recognized youth conflict education and gender expert and an award winning author. He taught for many years at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and was I'm very, very pleased to say a Jennings Randolph senior fellow here at the US Institute of Peace a few years ago and followed that with a period as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for scholars. He has written prodigiously on the topic of youth in conflict. I suggested to Mark before the panel that for those of us who are not quite as productive as he is, he might want to tone things down a little bit because we look at his regular output of impressive work with a great deal of envy. He is the author of Stuck, Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood, which received honorable mention for the 2013 Bethwell Ogote Book Prize. He is now about to finish a volume called The Outcast Majority, War, Development and Africa's Youth, and this his eighth book is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press in 2015. Our second speaker will be Dr. Rebecca Wolf, a leading expert on the drivers of youth violence. She is currently director of Mercy Corps Conflict Management Team. She's taught at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and the Wagner School for Public Service at New York University. She's also an affiliate at Yale University's McMillan Program on Conflict Resolution and Health and received a PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University. Rebecca will be focusing on strategies of intervention with attention to what works and what doesn't in programming designed to mitigate youth violence. Last but by no means least, Marianne Yerkes will follow Rebecca. Marianne has 17 years of experience working in international development with an emphasis on democracy, human rights and governance. She is a senior civil society and youth advisor in AID Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance and a youth point of contact within the Bureau on Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. Her areas of expertise include youth engagement, civil society, development, cross-sectoral programming and peacebuilding and conflict resolution. She is currently leading agency efforts to explore how serious games, educational, mobile and computer games can strengthen youth engagement and other development programs. And Marianne will discuss USAID's current analytic framework, its funding priorities and lessons learned from its current programming. So with no further ado, Mark, the podium is yours. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Sharon and USIP and Mercy Corps for inviting me here. My talk is going to draw from research and analysis from the forthcoming book, Outcast Majority, Steve mentioned. And I'm going to start with two stories that I think help underscore the two central themes of my talk. The first is the significance of failed adulthood and the need to understand local context before acting. So the first story concerns Palestinian youth during the first Intifada. There was a researcher who found that Palestinian male youth were using violent resistance to the Israeli military as a contemporary right of passage into manhood. They wanted to be arrested. Once a young Palestinian male emerged from prison or returned from a beating at the hands of the Israeli military, male youth gained a new status of respect in manhood. They were actually welcomed as heroes, as men because of this experience. Now far fewer female youth were involved in Intifada violence, but their encounters with Israeli forces shed light on certain feminine traits, stoicism and silence to protect the community in a way that boosted their profile as well. A second scenario is very different, but connected to this issue of failed adulthood. This is from research in Rwanda with youth there for the book that I wrote called Stuck. A qualitative research with youth and with government officials confirmed that the housing crisis had made it virtually impossible for most youth to become adults. In Palestine failed adulthood could lead youth to actively engage in violent resistance, but in Rwanda failed adulthood fueled youth migration to cities among other things. Some of these urban youth are known as wanderers or hopeless youth and have a potentially dangerous profile. They are humiliated and they're extremely desperate and people in the city are very worried about this population which seems to be growing very fast. I want to briefly mention three youth exclusion factors and then talk about what these the outcomes of that some of the results of that exclusion. The first kind of exclusion is this issue of cultural exclusion which can lead to failed adulthood as reflected in the two stories. A lot of the countries that are affected by war are unstable. For most youth it's almost impossible to be recognized as an adult and or it's an adult one. The second is systemic exclusion. This can emerge directly from education systems that make advancing beyond primary school exceptionally difficult and as assistant secretary Richard mentioned in during wars you can't even get that far with regards to Syria. The third factor is demographics as I think we all know colossal really unprecedented youth populations generally reduced prospects for gaining an education a job or adulthood. It makes it much much much more difficult. In many conflict affected context the pool of excluded youth is really enormous. So how do youth respond to exclusion? The negative fallout can lead in many directions such as fatalism which can lead to not really caring if you contract AIDS or something like that because you're really fatalistic about what's going to happen in your future. It can lead of course as in the Rwanda case to urban migration. Rwanda has one of the highest rates of urbanization in the world. It is connected to failed adulthood. Drug and alcohol abuse is is quite common with with people with who are excluded. Prostitution, unmarried motherhood, most most youth become parents. Quite often it's too difficult to be married and there are many consequences for pregnant single young women. Work in informal sectors including criminal work. One of the things I've noticed is that the drug trade is really growing in a lot of these war post-war situation contexts in the cities in a way that's really quite striking. Now at the same time many youth demonstrate a level of tenacity focus and entrepreneurial ingenuity which is really striking. And an ability to resist engagement in violence even in the face of humiliating desperate circumstances. It seems to me that that's something we don't focus on much which the question is why are youth so peaceful? Most youth are really remarkably peaceful given their circumstances. So what do we do? I'm going to end with three thoughts. First, too often the people who set policy and program policies for youth, priorities for youth, do not interact with them. The tendency to rely on quantitative statistics and preset priorities such as boosting formal sector employment for youth as a kind of just a formula for addressing youth issues may not align with the priorities on the ground and unintentionally may make things worse. If you end up giving jobs, working to give jobs to the included youth, the elite youth, this is a symbolic statement towards excluded youth and it can really exacerbate the responses that excluded youth are engaged in anyway. So a recommended first step is to understand the local context of youth exclusion including which youth resist and engage in violence, whether and how police and other security forces are fueling youth violence and exclusion. And a second is to find out if youth left out of programs are negatively impacted and then address it. And three, develop sophisticated strategic targeting for programming. An example of that would be if gang members are the target of a program with regards to youth and violence. Local profiles can differ quite significantly here are two examples. In Bushumbura, it's mostly ex-combatants, they don't have names, they just come at night and they're really violent and they rape a lot and they sweep through areas and rob and so do the police but they do that in the day. In Juba, the gang members are a combination of elite leaders with ties to government officials so they don't get arrested in many cases and orphans. Now in both of these countries the level of the orphan populations are enormous and really I mean strikingly high found in research there. So finally a key theme in this talk is the need to understand the local context of youth exclusion before developing responses. Part of this process is to answer two questions it seems to me. The first one is how do male and female youth gain social recognition as adults? The second one is what happens if they fail? The cases of Palestine and Rwanda provide contrasting context specific responses to this question. Thanks very much. Thank you you did admirably well Rebecca. You're going to shake it up a little? Okay very good totally. So I'm not Rebecca I'm Marianne Yerkes with USAID. We had talked previously about how to organize this so I wanted to follow that given that Mark raised some very important issues concerning policy and programming. First I'd like to thank Mercy Corps and ICUSIP obviously for organizing this session and the insightful remarks from Mark and Secretary Richard. Mark touched on a number of the issues related to youth exclusion and what drives youth exclusion. I wanted to touch briefly on some of the broader evidence that we have but really focus on some of the core concepts and principles that we need to keep in mind in addition to what Mark mentioned when we're doing programming in this space. So to start with clearly the trends and statistics are quite sobering however there is hope. We are gaining a much better understanding of what are the drivers of conflict and armed violence and the dynamics involved in this process as Mark mentioned. But maybe more importantly as well we're seeing that young people themselves are stepping up and are demanding to be involved in this conversation and demonstrating that they are and can be agents of change and positive change. Concerning a growing evidence space we have a much better understanding in terms of protective factors and risk factors that are involved and Mark touched on some of those. In terms of risk factors we're talking about conditions that are increasing youth's engagement and or rejection or actually that are driving young people to violence or to become victims of violence and protective factors being those that can reduce overall risk of violent behavior and strengthen youth resiliency. We also talk about the push factors that push youth to violence such as the devastation of family and social structures exclusion and pull factors that attract young people to violence such as the need for a sense of identity and safety for example. And we know increasingly that it's not a single risk factor but it's a combination of risk factors at multiple layers or levels that are involved from the individual level to the relationship level, community level and societal levels. I think there's some interesting research as well a general recognition that there are similarities across the different types of violence in violent environments be it armed violence, gangs, militias etc in terms of the psychological factors that might be driving young people who are voluntarily engaging in violence. There's the OECD's note on youth and armed violence which is extremely important if you're not familiar with that I'd recommend you reviewing that but they talk about these psychological factors being similar in terms of joining youth gangs or militias and actually note that the type of group joined is more a result of proximity, opportunity and familiarity than a reflection of fundamental differences in psychological motivations of young people. So there's a growing knowledge about these different types of violence but I think we need to know much more and do more research. In terms of USA's engagement in the space with youth and armed violence is nothing new to the agency we've been working for a long time on youth programming and also in the space of conflict resolution as many of you know and we have a number of policies and strategic frameworks that guide our work there's a youth and development policy that came out as well as the US government action plan on children and adversity and the work related to countering violent extremism policies and assessment frameworks related to that among a number of other frameworks that are important and we also have assessment tools that help us to better understand what's driving violence in these different areas and what are potential solutions. For the remainder of my talk I'd like to focus on some of the core concepts and principles that we have to take into consideration we can't touch on all of them obviously but some of the key ones that I think are important and I'd also like to highlight that the youth and development policy that includes a conceptual framework as well as core principles is relevant for all forms or all environments in which we're working with youth so I think we should be challenged to look at how we can integrate those principles into our work and Mark mentioned it and I think it's probably one of the most important lessons learned in this space is that we have to have that solid understanding of local context of what are the actual drivers to violence and in terms of youth and armed violence that means having that broader understanding of conflict so some of our assessment frameworks focused on conflict assessments extremism assessments can help to understand those dynamics but it's also incredibly important to have a sense of the youth dimensions so we have a cross electoral youth assessment framework we also have an at-risk youth module that helps to better understand how youth are involved that helps to understand the support structures that are in place and so that's incredibly important and as Mark mentioned as well I think there's more of a movement towards getting more individualized and targeted programming so a better sense of improving our targeting of youth so I'll touch on it hopefully in the question and answer section but we have some innovations in the lack area in terms of looking at very strategic tools to better understand the individual risk factors that are involved in terms of gain engagement so I think that's incredibly important and also in terms of assessments we also know that it's critical to have young people involved so not just in terms of the focus groups and interviews but actually to have young people that are part of the assessment team itself and that can obviously be challenging in these difficult areas but it's very important and not just youth as token youth but actually youth that actually understand of the youth groups that you're trying to engage another key point too and I know it's a bit cliche but it's the importance of focusing on the resiliences of youth and the assets of young people it does seem cliche but I can't emphasize that enough the way that we frame these conversations a lot of times it's youth in violence this youth and extremism is the youth bulge and while those are important ways to understand these problems the mental constructs themselves can sometimes result into a narrowing of our programs to focus on how do we target and keep young people from engaging in extremism or violence so I just think we have to keep in mind that while some of those targeted programs may be important we need to look at resiliences and we need to have the broader context of youth engagement and the challenges facing young people that brings me to the point of youth participation which mark touched on very much in terms of exclusion and what's causing youth exclusion in many places we do have a number of assessments and evaluations at risk youth assessments and evaluations that demonstrate indeed that a lack of youth voice and participation is one of the core risk factors in many places not always the same but that that is something that sometimes is driving youth engagement and violence and just to give an example of that many of you are well familiar with the yes youth can program and Rebecca may be touching on this in her talk in Kenya that was created following the post-election violence in 2007 and I mentioned that here because it was very much designed based on an in-depth at-risk youth assessment that was done and one of the core findings of that assessment was that youth voice or the lack of youth voice was a critical issue there that young people especially marginalized young people felt they had absolutely no way to have their voices heard be it through existing government institutions civil society groups youth organizations themselves so that program was designed with that youth participation being a core pillar of support and I'd say though that youth participation programs and components are extremely challenging especially in these difficult environments so they have to be very carefully managed they can result in more destabilization if we're not careful and I think in divided societies it's extremely important to look at ways to link youth across communities that brings me to another key point which is that youth voice is critical a bit alone it's not enough to address some of the core risk factors and concerns for long-term and to encourage long-term sustainable solutions and mid-term evaluation of some of USAID's at-risk programs in East Africa not the yes-youth-can program but others demonstrated that many cases youth were participating they were engaged however some of them felt that they were not able to be there their sense of efficacy was very limited and that that resulted in frustration and therefore potential vulnerabilities to kind of more non-democratic attitudes so based on that finding the evaluators recommended that there be more attention more focused attention to strengthening linkages to the local government institutions to civil society to media to create a broader context for youth influence so this relates directly to the youth development principle which is about providing and involving and supporting mentors families and communities so looking at ways to engage the broader community and creating that space for youth and especially young people who've been involved in violence and I think that's a real challenge looking at the structures and how you can engage young people and create that enabling environment for them another critical point to keep in mind too is that this is a very multi-dimensional phenomenon in armed violence and in order to address that we have to have a systemic approach so we need to be looking at cross-sectoral approaches at multiple levels not just focusing on one sector that requires coordination our crime prevention programs in the Latin American and Caribbean region are an example of that they've been working for a number of years with multiple societal actors from police to community associations civil society groups municipal associations to address these challenges and actually creating partnerships to advance and create a broader kind of environment for challenging violence and finally I'd say the as we try to improve our targeting which I do think is one key point mark mentioned that and how to really identify some of the young people that are maybe most vulnerable for violence how do we do that in a way that makes sense to balance it with the broader support to youth into communities this is important to other youth this is important not only from a do no harm perspective and that we don't want to increase inequalities or frustrations but there are also programmatic reasons to doing that so I had mentioned the importance of community structures linking young people to communities that's absolutely essential even looking at how some of the maybe offenders are connected to youth as well you can have demonstration models where young people might be positively engaged in the community now obviously that's extremely challenging but that's the argument for having kind of a more holistic approach so obviously we can't touch on all the key principles here that are important and some of you probably are sitting there thinking about other critical ones like second chance opportunities the gender dimensions of violence that mark touched upon and which is absolutely essential a whole session needs I mean we need more attention to those issues I think there are a lot of research gaps there but I did want to highlight some of them that I think are particularly important and then end on kind of an ethical note I'd say that as we engage in this very challenging space and sensitive environments that we need to keep in mind that we have to integrate protection measures into our programs so protection is one of the core concepts in the youth and development process on policy that we really need to look and see how our programs are doing that our programs aligned with international and legal frameworks national frameworks related to youth vulnerabilities and conflict and disaster response also something that's extremely important is paying attention to the fact that many young people given their stage in development of a brain development may be willing to take risks that you know an adult might not you know take the risk so we have to be mindful of that in the sensitive programming and also to keep open communication channels and lines with communities and youth to not raise youth expectations and then you know mobilize a bunch of disaffected youth and address their concerns and then all of a sudden we're not there anymore and of course you'll challenge me and others in terms of our bureaucratic hurdles there but just to kind of summarize again I would reiterate the point that Mark made which I I think is an essential point which is understanding the local context we can we have to challenge our assumptions and really get out there and see what the factors are at play the importance of integrating these positive youth development principles which are not just for study state environments but into all of our work and then on that to recognize that in some cases we may need to have very targeted interventions to address concerns around elections or to address an immediate issue but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be working with others in the community other donors other civil society groups in government institutions to have that longer-term focus to think about a comprehensive plan for addressing youth development concerns generally not only of those youth that are disaffected but of the broader community so I'll end there um thank you thank you very much thank you um I want to first thank usip for helping to cosponsor this event assistant secretary Richard for her opening remarks and mark and Marianne for their engaging in this important discussion for those not not familiar with mercy core I just want to give a couple brief words about the agency we work mostly exclusively almost exclusively in high-risk conflict and post-conflict environments we currently manage a country programs in about 40 countries 73 fall into the category of fragile or critically weak states while we recognize that these are difficult places to operate we believe that transitional environments countries affected by civil wars economic and political crisis or natural disasters also offer tremendous opportunity for positive change we began to delve deeper into this question of the drivers of youth violence in response to the conflicting results in the literature about why young people participated particularly the quantitative results were conflicting in the literature while at the same time we were seeing common responses to reducing youth participation in violence particularly a heavy weighting of youth employment programs to promote stability in many environments and looking at this information together we realize two variables were missing in the analyses and discussions so we there was no disaggregation by type of violence in these studies it was at this macro level and as Marianne discussed there are certain factors where we do see common across the types of violence so I would say for gangs and a lot of extremist movements that need for identity and belonging is a particularly important factor there are differences between these types of violence for example you see in kenyan kyrgyzstan there were short blips of inter-ethnic violence motivated by financial incentives in pakistan afghanistan and somalia we see longer ideological wars focused on extremism and in Liberia Uganda and now south sudan where unicef is reporting 9 000 child soldiers we see civil wars fueled through significant child soldier recruitment the factors and recruitment tactics differ among these various movements this leads to the second variable we felt was missing in this discussion these studies at the macro level weren't looking at individual factors of why young people participate in violence steve mentioned earlier that i'm a social psychologist so i tried to look at both a combination of individual factors and structural environments and how that influences behavior and that was not part of the discussion but in our programming ultimately we are trying to influence and change behavior and if we are trying to do that we need to look at both those factors together as assistant secretary richard mentioned the study that mercy core just did in with syrian adolescents what was clear in this study was that it was the emotions that were driving young people to participate in violence particularly the adolescent boys they talked about humiliation and protection of their families not a it wasn't this cost benefit analysis in terms of why they wanted to participate so we felt to design effective programs to prevent young people particularly young men from becoming involved in violence we needed to look at these motivations well as well as systemic incentives for participation the long-range goal for the research i will present today is to see if these categories of political violence cluster with certain motivations and therefore we can design more appropriate interventions to do this i'm going to talk about three specific countries kenya which maryan mentioned that mercy core is implementing part of the large yes youth can program samalia and afghanistan and how the findings from our research is influencing programming so i'll start with kenya so as maryan mentioned the program was largely designed to prevent election related violence from repeating itself in 2013 as it had occurred in 2007 at the same time that usa was running their cross-sectoral assessment we did another study not in parallel looking at afrobarometer data looking at very quantitative results and what we found was that youth who were unemployed were more likely to participate in violence youth who participated in collective action community service were less likely to engage in political violence and youth who identified more with their kenyan identity versus their ethnic identity were less likely to participate in violence as these findings aligned very much with what usa found in their cross-sectoral assessment and informed our implementation of the program the yes youth camp program is seen as largely successful and one of the things that usa aid and mercy core and the other implementing partners are figuring out now is how do we make the structures that are part of the program sustainable over the long term and we know political factors played a role in why this election was so peaceful but the program addressed three of these factors explicitly one access to finance for young people so they could become self-employed community service opportunities and opportunities for participation at all levels from the community level to the county level to the national level and networking youth across ethnic and geographic divides last fall we did a survey of youth both in the program and outside the program and found youth in the program were less likely to believe violence was justified in certain circumstances compared to those who were not in the program so we are seeing significant effects of this program in terms of reduction in participation of violence as well as hearing their voice and seeing them take more leadership roles in their country the second area i'm going to talk about is samalia where mercy core is implementing another large usa program i realize all the programs i'm talking about today are hitting in the tens of thousands if not millions of youth yes youth can mercy core alone is reaching three million youth overall the program is probably up to about across all divides is eight million youth samalia the program we're implementing is reaching will reach about 25 000 youth in the end and the explicit theory of change in the program is if samali youth have increased education economic and civic participation opportunities there will be an increase in stability we analyzed our baseline data similarly to how we did it in the kenya study and we found unemployment was uncorrelated with participation in support for political violence education level was also uncorrelated with participation and support for political violence perceived discrimination was our strongest predictor of participation in political violence but also we strangely found civic engagement and self-efficacy were correlated with increased support for political violence the employment finding was not a surprise to us since financial incentives are likely not a main motivator for participation in ideological conflicts in these cases jobs are likely not enough the findings around civic engagement and self-efficacy did surprise us and as a result we have changed our implementation a bit we are incorporating peace building education curriculum in the schools much more explicitly with a specific focus on providing role models for peaceful change in the curriculum the idea is that in places like samalia most people see change happening through violence and if there are examples of how people and young people in particular can make change through nonviolent means they may take that opportunity the program still has about two and a half more years and i hope we will be back to show you the impact of this program then the last program i will talk about is our diffid funded vocational program in helman called invest and it's reaching almost 20 000 youth right now we and we recently conducted an impact evaluation the main goal of the program is to increase employment however implicit in the theory of change is that increased development would increase stability in the area we found that the program has been extremely successful in terms of employment where program participants were significantly more likely to find jobs than people in the control group we also found that by improving vocational opportunities the program positively influence young people's perceptions of their government's ability to perform key functions such as job creation it improved their confidence and self-efficacy and they like in kenya program participants were more likely to identify as afghan rather than their tribal identity however we did not see a direct impact on propensity to engage in violence as a result of this program we are going to continue to analyze this data particularly to see if some of those intermediate outcomes around identity perceptions of the government and confidence will moderate or mediate the effect on participation in violence and we will also pursue some qualitative data opportunities we have anecdotal data that local officials have said crime has been reduced in areas of program implementation so we will further see if we can look we will further look into those results but based on the current these current and other results that i was not able to present in depth today i'd like to end with four points donors and program implementers need to explicitly design programs to contribute to stability where it is a goal to do this we need to map how activities will lead to lowering youth propensity to engage in violence in some cases where the motivator for participation is greed or grievance over access to development gains then we may see a direct impact on stability when we improve development outcomes for all however in many cases as we see in afghanistan increasing employment alone will not directly nor quickly impact stability i say that i also want to make clear this does not mean that these development interventions such as education employment leadership participation opportunities are not important in their own right but they may not directly impact stability in every case intentional violence prevention programming should be paired with these interventions preventing future violence is a goal for example in the case of long civil wars with prolonged displacements these interventions are critical as assistant secretary richard explained otherwise there will be this generational gap and there will be few people capable of moving these societies forward once the violence clears however in these prolonged ideological conflicts these interventions may not have direct impact on reducing propensity of youth engaged engagement in violence i do want to note that where we may see the most direct impact of education on stability is where there is forced recruitment as in south sudan both in ugandan seara leone education was found to be a protective factor for child soldiers as marianne mentioned motivations and incentives are multifaceted no one predictor of violence dominated in any one setting we've looked at therefore we need these integrated soft cross-sectoral approaches to mitigate youth violence we recently analyzed the afrobrometer data from 2013 for 13 sub-saharan countries and found that not one factor was a predictor of violence or a correlate of violence in and no more than six countries the ones that were significant in six were household whether a household member had been attacked or government corruption an added note poverty was significant for participation in political violence for only four countries including kenyan zimbabwe but unemployment was not a significant predictor in any one of these 13 countries lastly as violence shifts in societies so should our prevention approaches and this is something mark touched on while in 2008 we did find a correlation in kenya between employment and participation in violence in 2013 we do not see this and so as the nature of violence changes in these societies so should our prevention approaches those are um i'll end on that note and i'll turn it over to steve thank you thank you very much thank you my thanks to all of all of our speakers i i have to say i come away from these presentations actually feeling somewhat heartened because i think what we've seen on the part of all of our speakers is the extent to which a commitment to evidence-based programming and to developing a knowledge base about both the dynamics but also the causes of youth violence is becoming institutionalized across the critical actors in the sector usa id mercy core there's a community of researchers out there who are giving us just extraordinarily nuanced information about the contexts that facilitate youth participation in violence how varied they are how complex they are and how to integrate that knowledge into the design of programming so into a program so we are really reaching a point i think when this long sought goal of programming and strategies of intervention that rest on very clearly defined theories of change on an effort to try to understand causal relationships in context on an effort to try to understand how volatile those causal relationships can be how dynamic they can be is being absorbed and institutionalized by the people who are actually doing the work in the field and for anyone who really cares about making a difference i think that stands in very very sharp contrast to an era in efforts to respond to youth violence that were far more mechanical far less thoughtful and reflective and far less tightly anchored in the kind of empirical data that you're collecting and that you're not just collecting that you're integrating into your programming and to know that some of the key actors in this in this field are doing this kind of work i think is is really a marker of of progress in our efforts to to make a meaningful difference as opposed to simply throwing money at a problem and and i think we can all take some degree of of comfort in that um marion i wanted to begin by asking about your comments because one of the things that i think um was quite clear in your presentation about the complexities of youth participation in violence is that everything matters you know institutions matter governance matters psychology identity as you suggested all of those things are very critically important economic opportunities uh we we have an enormous enormous set of factors that are meaningful in determining youth participation in in violence um i'm not sure the field is organized in a way that responds very well to problems of that degree of complexity and tight integration across variables that are often attended to by different players in the field um what do we do about that if if the problems are complex integrated multi-dimensional um dynamic uh what do we do you know this is a real problem for the field and and at a i d you're the guys who really have to wrestle with that right right so it is a huge issue and i can say that a number of our us aid missions are paying more more attention to youth issues generally and so there are some efforts in certain missions to develop broader youth frameworks for example results frameworks looking at youth across the mission so maybe there's an initiative or a program that's targeting specifically youth violence issues but there is kind of a movement to try to see how you might integrate youth concerns into other programs so there's this this effort in different places to have a broader sense of youth challenges to look across some of the programs how are they connected but it is extremely difficult because a lot of our money is obviously through certain sectors so even trying to promote these more holistic and integrative programming you know it's extremely difficult because we have reporting challenges we have to show how the money is addressing certain specific impacts so for example we may know that livelihoods interventions are critical potentially for engaging some young people who might be involved in violence but if we were to look at those outcomes from a livelihoods perspective and an economic growth perspective we may say oh these failed you know so we have to i think do a better job of strategizing seeing the country challenge the problem doing the analysis and then working across in a more integrative manner kind of our our country programs let me give you one example i touched on central america and i think we have colleagues here who are working on some very complex initiatives related to the central american regional security initiative which is focused on crime prevention and youth violence and they've had some some innovative initiatives there targeting focusing on crime prevention but bringing together the different actors looking at law enforcement interventions gang reintegration what we call primary interventions which are targeting youth geographically maybe having youth outreach centers for young people so this holistic approach and it in and of in and of itself is innovative however they through studying the interventions and looking at other data domestic data and others related to gang interventions they realized that they needed to do a stronger job of kind of targeting as I mentioned the youth that really were engaging in violence so they have created a partnership with the city of LA and with UCLA to create a community of practice around crime prevention recognizing this is complex that we're dealing with it in a number of different places and they're currently looking to adapt a tool it's called the youth services eligibility tool which actually is based on longitudinal research on gang engagement and identifying nine kind of core individual risk factors that Rebecca was talking about trying to get more targeted that are frequently involved in young people engaging in gangs and what they've determined is that if young people have four or more of these risk factors then they're at a higher risk for engagement in gang violence and so this partnership is important because they're actually testing it and looking at how they can integrate that very specific tool that would really look at what are the core individual factors and what might be some secondary interventions as we call it targeting the most at-risk youth that can be very strategic that could say you know engage with families and they're training service providers to administer the tool and to come up with very targeted interventions for those youth so that is a component that they're looking at and they're doing evaluations of but it's integrated in this broader program you know that is focused on kind of community engagement and violence etc so it's it's challenging you have a multitude of actors involved we have to the evidence is critical so we have to tell the story better we have to be very clear about what we're trying to achieve and to explain what these different components are if it's primarily as Rebecca mentioned you know a goal to you know avert violence that we are seeing that as the overarching goal and we're maybe not expecting to have initially huge outcomes in one particular sector and we have to tell congress that story a bit better and explain why that's important so it is extremely complex but I think that having the the people working on it coming together having these opportunities to learn having the evaluations available and really dig into that and question ourselves and not just say that a program failed you know if you look at yes youth can for example there will be an impact evaluation I think coming out soon it'll be very important to look at that I know that that you know there you know some questions about whether you know economic opportunities of young people were greatly increased through this well that wasn't the initial goal it was a critical piece but now as you might look at what's next you have all these young people mobilized you have an increase in youth participation maybe now's the time to look at how can you strengthen economic opportunities through linkages with institutions so I think we have to be clear about what we're trying to do and acknowledge when we you know have gaps but thank you did you want to speak to that as well a little bit I mean there were a couple of comments that I had to marry and I guess lastly on this piece about whether or not a program has that sectoral impact and we have seen also related to targeting so we also have seen that these livelihoods interventions and actually sports-based interventions are most effective at targeting those most at risk so those young people aren't going to join a youth leadership program you're going to get as mark called them the ones who are already involved going to a youth leadership program but we have found in particularly in rural areas rural areas and some peri-urban areas is that the young people who are most at risk will go will do kind of this alternative intervention in order to get to that larger goal and so we have found that quite effective thank you mark you have the distinct advantage of sitting somewhat outside of this community of practitioners and implementers and so on as an observer we've seen the extent to which USAID Mercy Corps others are focusing on collection of data that gives them the opportunity to think critically about what's working and what isn't as a researcher do you see over the past five seven years that these these priorities on the part of donors and implementers to evidence-based programming are making a difference do you see when you go out into the field that the impact of these programs is evident among the youth communities in which you've conducted research are they are they thinking differently are they are they responding differently to the incentives that these programings are intended to create in other words just from your vantage point is all of this adding up to a significant improvement on the ground that's a that's a tough question i know why should i ask an easy question no no no it's all right i'm going to give you a tough answer because i think it's the results are mixed and generally uninspiring and i think that when i'm hearing rebecca talk about reaching three million youth i mean part of exclusion is that most youth don't get into secondary school most youth never have a shot of getting into a program and they know it so um so it's very important to know as i said who gets into a program and what is the outcome for people who don't get into a program because it can really support their sense of being left out now in a lot of places um i find there is such a focus a pressure on numbers on getting youth into programs that um the the the tendency is and you know programmers say this to just fill it up and when you do that you get well adjusted youth and that's where i warned that some of these programs can be counter can have a negative impacts very unintentionally but when you have a pressure to cram people into a program and and have good results right away you know at-risk youth the ones that rebecca's talking about and mariana's talking about and the assistant secretary was talking about you know they have issues and it's not they're gonna not their job is not to make you look well right away in terms of your indicators and so forth so so you see uh you see in a lot of situations where there are youth programs and i have big questions and i want to tell one question one example from sierra leone which i which comes to mind is this idea of working through communities can be really counterproductive and they this was an agency in a post war country i don't know if you can find a country that talks more about youth than sierra leone and the outcomes are really underwhelming um talk to youth i mean you know there are more and more in diamond mines and gold mines which tells you what's going on with uh with options so in this one example the they had sierra leonean elites organizing the program how did they get the the people into a program they went to chief's community-based and they said you know and chief had a list and i said so who are these people well they're the people from you know the chief doesn't have money for his supporters so he gets them into a program and they as sierra leoneans they didn't see a problem with this this is how it works and uh the thing is is in rwanda youth don't know about programs barundi they don't even know about programs south sudan would be similar um they're not aware of programs but in sierra leone they're aware and they know that the um they know who's getting into these programs particularly female youth with children were really um very upset about the fact that you know the favored youth were getting into these programs and it was hard to watch it was hard to talk to people who kept obsessing about these programs because they had no shot of getting in so i think you have a demonstration effect when you can't get most youth into a program again i'm accepting this amazing number of three million in kenya um usually it's not like that and i think we have to be really careful about not fueling exclusion and really being very targeted um as marianne was talking about as well on who's in there and why and what are the outcomes for people who don't get in and because i don't and i and i and this is something that i think we need to think about a little more deeply yeah please can i add something on that i mean this is where my my larger youth youth hat and uh promotion of youth development comes then that i think that will perpetually be the problem as long as we're focusing on donor programs and so there's a lot of push for you know focusing on systems based approach working with the institutions to create more supports and opportunities within the country like through the government where appropriate that that are more long-term now obviously and many of these environments that's extremely difficult because the institutions are destroyed but i think it's it's looking at how you know maybe we have a large program yes you can you know you've mobilized these youth but maybe you can use that youth voice to say we need more long-term policies you've spoken a lot about some of the core policies that governments may be implementing that if we could change that it could actually reach more young people so i think we have to shift a focus to more the system and recognizing the challenges in these environments but how can we work with those local actors maybe use youth voice to say we need more young people i mean kenya they have for example youth funds like they're funding from the government available for young people but when you talk to the people you know that are out in the communities they don't know about it or they think that it's available for the elite youth but if you have a large you know youth mobilization program they could bring attention to that so i think we have to look more at the system and because otherwise we simply can't keep funding you know all these programs can i add one thing is just just to follow up on that is is it seems to me that one asset we're not making use of is the fact that governments are afraid of male youth in a lot of places and that can help get people's attention government people's attention to start working on policies and changing policies that are unintentionally help fueling exclusion and i really support that it's that systems-based approach is very important well and i i would i would just add i think on the yes youth can program in particular it was a very explicit decision to avoid training because that's an expensive intervention that excludes a lot of young people and so we worked with usa to really minimize the training and it was a and there was no application process to be part of the program again we often see a lot of programs spend a lot of time just trying to decide which youth can be part of it and which youth can't and so that was able to create this large mobilization which then could advocate for policy change and it's i think a model that we should be considering more in other places yeah and and all of this makes very clear that it isn't only the challenge of navigating these very complex programming contexts that you all have to wrestle with it's how you you take the insights and lessons that you've accumulated based on the research you've done in the field and infuse them into the budget and policy environments in washington in which decisions are made that impose constraints on the opportunities you have for programming that often force you into frameworks that tend not to be as effective as one might wish in providing the kind of sustained inclusive opportunities to deal with these issues that we really need and so there is a kind of issue of navigating the field and there's an issue of navigating washington and the two are very very clearly connected why don't we shift to questions from the field i see from the field from the audience i see a lot of hands that's fabulous we have some microphones on the side what i'd ask you to do is to approach one of the microphones if you'd like to ask a question i'll move back and forth from one to the other please keep your questions brief make sure they're questions and please identify yourselves to our panel sir ma'am yeah good morning ladies and gentlemen i just want to thank you for your wonderful presentation and my name is rosemary seguero my organization is called hope for tomorrow i'm past here in washington dc and i'm from kenya and i want to thank president opama for the young leaders who will be coming this month and the state department for their wonderful work because it's the administration of uh making the young people uh why we focus on young people my son was killed in kenya and my nephew was killed in the twenty two thousand and seven election so we focused more on um uh violence looking from the community level hate crime um triumph triple and political violence this is the course while it's poverty related because many young people in kenya and africa are not employed so they are looking for attention as max said nobody we're just talking about youth with the leaders are not getting dialogue with the with the young people organization are not getting the young people that involved how do we get together and make this up and i'm hearing about your organizations i'm past here we have no funding but we just started a campaign on one voice one africa to campaign fighting violence crime and the work in the organization we are working with from africa so we'll be traveling to all african countries before elections after elections and just talking about it to stop violence and chop creation to empower young people we don't have funding so how do we make this happen we've never got funding we don't have funding but the thing is how do we get the message to the young people involved like now we are here this message is supposed to be to the actors who are young people who are doing violence in africa we need to have a video conference when we are talking they need to hear how do we get to them how do they know the message and what you are talking to them like president opama when they come we appreciate but when they go back we hope they'll talk about it but how do we collaborate with the state department with us id with marico or everybody to make this happen we talk here today and it's gone so when it's gone again we come here next year still violence in congo violence in sudan violence in kenya violence in south africa we start the same story again and no impact as he said we have few people who hear about what is really happening what funding they are giving or what asset helps so how do we work together from the community level up to the high level of president opama and the african presidents thank you thank you very much how can groups active in the field become aware of opportunities that a id might offer or opportunities for engaging with the work that mercy corps do so one thing i want to to highlight and i would have done it earlier is that there are a number of people involved in an effort to develop or that did develop guiding principles on young people's engagement in peace building so that's a group and i know mercy corps of parts you may have more details but it's a group of donors as well as implementing partners that have been working for quite some time it's it's led by the un interagency network on youth development there's a sub working group that is focused on a youth and peace building and so they just recently worked and reached out to i think close to i don't remember how many young people all around to develop these principles and then launch the principles and they're holding some meetings in like 11 different countries to kind of engage young people and talk about it now i know it's principles right and they're talking about operational guidelines but i just want to mention that's a high level effort to kind of raise these issues so that they're first and foremost on you know those who do have money that do have funding are aware of it and can kind of think of how to to reprogram their initiatives in terms of usa id for those of you who aren't familiar i mean we're very decentralized so a lot of our funds are kind of strategized in countries so we have our offices and missions in the countries that develop their strategies so when people are in those countries kind of you know making connection to the usa id office and learning more about what they're doing and forming them about it i think that's an important part and we have procurements on this we're trying to bring more attention to the issue of youth and violence within the democracy conflict and humanitarian assistance bureau we have kind of a nascent working group of people interested in this issue so i think we have to you know again influence the policy makers donors to have this on the agenda so that there is funding available and then there are means to access that funding through you know paying attention to when there are solicitations getting to know the usa admissions in country and making partnerships with i think some of the organizations that are familiar with the system and how to engage thank you i'll just add a little bit particularly about kenya which is where i'm most familiar with our youth violence work is that around the 2013 election we actually also worked very closely with the cso office in order to coordinate various responses in the rift valley because there were so many groups interacting to prevent the election violence so we worked with church groups we worked with other cbo's in the area we worked with other usa partners to make sure that we had a coordinated response if violence did erupt thank you very much it local organizations really are critical uh in the success of these programs and the channels of communication are there they're not always as robust as they might be there's not always as much local awareness of opportunities as there might be but i do think that the usa id field missions which are central to much of the local programming are a very very useful kind of first stop i would certainly suggest sir i uh want to thank you very richison uh for the framework they have created and also want to congratulate uh first core uh for the great work you're doing in the world i uh maybe i have three questions for each of the speakers uh can i can i encourage you not to ask three questions for each speaker i don't know how i can do that certainly you know i'm here i'm a practitioner in the field uh specific in liberia but i don't have questions around uh but there is research uh i had a great speaker here just a couple of weeks ago from the center for social research uh what is very critical here in the research from 2000 to 2010 was part of a young man's dissertation creating transforming systems and individuals with training addressing behavior changes which focus on responsibility and accountability for desired outcomes in over 20 countries over that 10-year period was not addressed so when we look at social institutions that can affect youth no one is taking responsibility for these institutions to deliver services to anyone and specifically in youth so i think that uh as international actors that that may be something that we may want to look at and having that as a component as we create these frameworks and not just focus on uh funding but also how can we create institutions with individuals training them with responsibility and accountability to deliver the services because 10 years in 20 countries and there's been zero training in these areas is unacceptable so i'd like to to ask the panelists you know how can we address this um each of you gave a wonderful remarkable learning that i can take away uh from Mary Ann i think that the question that Steve asked of you you know what can you do i think what we can do is to create a larger container we can create a larger container for international actors maybe these new actors would come in with a new set of eyes a new set of eyes with new conversations that can can lead all of us you know in leading the transformation give us the results that we want we desired those what i mean is that you know we have in i'm in the private sector and we have uh individuals with action research in leading transformation so i think that by increasing larger container that we can have some collaborative uh efforts and i'd like to know how can we do that i think working with uh mercy core certainly with aid uh is one way we can do that it's just looking you know how do we get some help get these desired outcomes how can we do that certainly you know um i think the the great point that we mentioned about having this integrative process to deal with the social psychology but i think that we have a tool it's from a non-profit organization known as the wellness recovery centered by dr. Mary Ann Copeland she received the lifetime achievement award from the department of health and human services but this is a tool to help individuals uh lead themselves and i think that that's a tool that's that's missing to deal with the mental health wellness piece and i think that as i put here is that how do we get individuals so that individuals can begin to do pure lead communities pure lead families and pure lead nation building so i think again you know how can we be inclusive got the individual out here it's only evidence base register lifetime achievement awards how do we get those tools in the hands of youth so they can begin to create this strength in the resilience same happiness and wellness how do we get these kinds of programs to be in collaboration with you thank you all thanks very much those are are clearly very important questions but also quite fundamental to how we think about programming i'm not sure this is the the forum for providing in-depth answers certainly given our panelists a great deal to think about but if there are any kind of brief reflections on those issues feel free to be specific specific about youth programming us aid has put together a training module about doing youth development programming for their missions and it was part of the equip three program and so i could imagine working with ministries at the government level with that training program and so to answer your question yes there needs to be training i will say we need the training and we need the incentives some of it's going to be financial and as mark mentioned that you know governments are worried about particularly young men and so if there's that incentive that they need to change the way they do business in order to address these the concerns of these people then you might see the transformation but you have to align both do they have the capability of transforming with the incentives to actually transform i would i would touch on on two things related to that i think you know there is more attention maybe on the negative side the fear of youth and violence but there is some opportunity and for example in sub-saharan Africa a number of ministers are interested in what's called the demographic dividend you know if they're the supports in place you have a growing youth population how can you tap into it etc so there's an opportunity to use that to there are you know individuals and people who see this as an interest is an issue so i think you can kind of try to build on that and also in the post-2015 discussions in terms of you know post-2015 millennium development goals there's a large number of youth organizations youth led movements that are pushing to have youth voice in these global discussions and i know there's some criticism of these high-level global issues and how that relates on the field but if that happens and more young people are engaged then that provides also potentially an opportunity and i think on that per your earlier question really providing the space for young people to lead on this i think is critical and the latin american region one of the programs there they're focusing on uh this youth movement as a youth against violence movement and it's young people you know who are leading this who are sharing and showing that it's possible so i think there's some opportunities here concerning your question about broadening the the pool or if you will or the container us aid has been going through a number of reforms that many of you may be familiar with to try to reach out and provide opportunities for groups that have not had us aid funding before so trying to change some of our procedures to make that more feasible both in terms of local organizations as well as maybe small businesses etc so i think there is a recognition that we need to do that thank you hi um my name is Mindy right north it is it's great i'm vice president of an NGO called global peace services usa we work in peace building conflict resolution my rather targeted question is on sports i had the opportunity to evaluate community development programs in kazakhstan in kyrgyzstan and they were starting sports leagues which was great however there are many facets to sports we don't need to be reminded too much about the antics and worse of fan clubs especially for soccer games and the violence that ensues on the one hand sports are seen as team building as character building as understanding the game on the other it instills a high degree of competitiveness sometimes vilification of the other and i'm wondering what kind of guidance and modulation people developing sports teams are getting because those activities can go in lots of different ways and it is a big thrust of many NGOs to work in this arena but there are facets to it and not all positive if not handled well thank you reflections on sports um yes in kenya um and in other places but i'll talk i mostly worked on our kenya sports program and again it was part of the post-election violence work we did after 2007 and there we were very explicit in the implementation one we developed a sports for peace curriculum so integrating peace building modules learning through sports as well as ensuring that the teams were interethnic and actually you can go into youtube and put in mercy court kenya and you can see some of the wonderful videos of these young people talking about their transformation as a result of their time in the program some of them were both victims some were victims of the violence and some were perpetrators and they talk about how the program impacted them so um we did it in consultation with a group called grassroots soccer but we based it off um what's called interspace negotiation framework that mercy core has worked on for a number of years and what it was it was both this communication of how to work together understanding interest not being positional how to be cooperative versus competitive and we have used this curriculum we're using it in Liberia now um we've also used it in Sri Lanka i'm gonna just add one thing is uh one of the things that happens for young people in a refugee camp or in a poor urban neighborhood is there's nothing to do and it's there's no stimulation and i've seen well organized youth programs sports programs get people to look forward to the afternoon towards sunset when they actually can be somebody do something with other people and engage and i think if it's done well and it's well organized such as the idea not making sure it's not one ethnicity against another for example um it can be wonderful and it's a it's a simple low-cost way of really getting people if anything just uh sort of having a more upbeat feeling about life than just sitting around and seeing all you know sort of getting mired in negativity so i think potentially it's terrific it's hard to get female youth involved because they're so busy um but in most situations but for boys it can be terrific and i must say one of the things that really helps is good uniforms at least a good t-shirt because at least then you then you're somebody you know so i think it has a lot of potential to really in a low-cost way to really move things forward in a positive way thank you we have about 15 minutes and six more of our audience members who'd like to ask questions so i'm just again encouraging um brevity um miss good morning my name is marzia i'm working with women for afghan women and i am a youth exchange and study alumni when i went back to afghanistan in 2007 the problem i had was with the government of course um american consul was a big support for us when we had projects they you know funded us and you know listened to us but the government didn't support us i needed you know security protection they were not there for me and when i went to the ministry and department of the education they didn't support us with their projects they said that we have that we have been brainwashed and you know and my question is how does in conservative country like afghanistan it worked you know to um to convince both the government and the youth to get involved in bringing positive changes for example in afghanistan there are millions of youth like me who are very disappointed with the government because they want to bring positive changes but they don't have the support i i'll um add what i can from our um program in helman which is obviously a very restrictive environment um particularly for young women what we have found is that with mercy core partnering with the government we can help work with them to be more responsive to young people and it is one of the results we are having as an impact of this program is that the government is by working with the government to provide these services so in the sense we mentor the government to do vocational training they can later then take on those services and work more directly with young people and young people as a result are seeing the government as being able to provide services so we're seeing the change happening at both ends thank you can i add with that i think it's it gets to the point of you know changing attitudes and behaviors about young people and it's not a lot of times it's government governments that either see youth as disruptive or not important so it's that enabling environment um and in trying to identify maybe other stakeholders it could be mercy core groups working international organizations working in that space maybe other local actors that have some say in working with them to kind of partner and it's that fine balance of youth voice and participation but finding the linkages i think you know two other members of the community who can help facilitate that and i also think you know other donors or embassies you know that might help by promoting the importance of engagement with youth diplomatically that can also help just i think that you raise really important about uh there there is often a real discomfort that government officials have with youth and i mean there's more than they've ever seen so what are they going to do now they want their vote and then after that sort of okay you know you young people you wait and uh and and and it's counterproductive and i think it's important to work with with governments to uh to look at that as well as as elders and community leaders i think it's a mistake to say that you're going to get to youth by going through the community i don't even know what that means anymore because most youths have no idea they don't belong to a community and a lot of their leaders don't like them and bad boys bad girls girls are dressing clothes too tight boys are wearing clothes too baggy that kind of thing or you know in my day that kind of thing and that just shuts off youth and it's counterproductive and i think there is an opportunity um which is something like the rebecca marianna mentioning is to really engage with governments and i and and i have found in i can't think of a government uh where this isn't the case there are government officials who are concerned and they're usually the ones on the ground and they usually have really good information but as you move up the ranks some do and then some are very you know these these kids these are there they're the problem with you know the situation today and so i think um we you know it to sort of blade you know sort of in a blanket way say the government's the problem i know a lot of youth think that but i think a frustration for some of the government officials on the ground is they really do care but they don't have a lot of government support and maybe there's a way for outside agencies to catalyze that and support those people because we really do need a broader way for most governments to engage with these youth populations that we've never seen before so it's a really good point thanks sir hi i'm jerry lavery i'm currently with michigan state university where i work in the afro barometer prior to that i worked at the national democratic institute ndi where i managed and implemented a regional youth political leadership academy in east africa so my question is actually from arianne the yali the young african leadership initiative i think is a great opportunity and probably the largest one of if not the largest youth program to come out of the u.s. government in several years i haven't heard a whole lot about linkages to civil society and the violent component of that are using the participants to go back and be these positive ages of change so if you could speak a little bit about the linkages between usa id programming and yali in the state department i think that would be great thank you thank you i would so so i i would say that from the beginning of the initiative that has been a key question in the halls of usa aid and talking to interagency colleagues about how we can use this is a great opportunity to train these young people that are coming here but to really look at what can they do when they go back and so as part of the recruitment process is as i understand it was also looking at what are they proposed to do when they go back part of identifying you know potential participants is you know has been to ensure it's you know how do you do this in a way that it's not just the elite youth right so how can you tap into existing youth organizations programs push out the information trying to loosen up a little bit the requirements for how young people can come here so i know that is a challenge i don't have a lot latest information in terms of the programming but i do know that there was one of the implementing partners working on this is specifically looking at linkages back in the country i think it's still a challenge but i think it is one of those incredible opportunities where you have this presidential initiative focused on youth focusing on african youth talking about leadership and so how we can use that as a momentum to create opportunities on the continent so i know in the early discussions that was part of a what else can be done how can we you know push this without a huge amount of funding exactly so that has been a major part of it and i think one of the interesting challenges i know colleagues who've worked on yes you can and said we have to this has to be very carefully done right because there's sometimes that perception that a young person is plucked out of the environment and might go and have this incredible experience and you know what does that mean when they go back and i remember that one of the head of the youth national groups was saying it's very important how selection is when there are these opportunities or how they go back and engage with their communities if we can find more opportunities for institutes like ndi has done a lot of work in the space you know to um to link those young people when they go back so it's a challenge and it's still being worked out but a lot of people are very interested in that and see it as a tremendous opportunity thanks let's let's leave it at that what i what i'd like to do thank you what i'd like to do is to take our two questions on this side give the panel a chance to respond and then our final two questions on this side before we wrap up ma'am thank you my name is manesh gailia tambian with communities without boundaries international part of the un interagency working group on youth and peace building and uh we were working very hard last wednesday and thursday putting together the operational guidelines um i i have an a comment about the analysis and then a question about intervention my comment about analysis is that we need to be very careful about um drawing sweeping conclusions about youth and conflict youth violence and youth and peace building um the reason i make this comment is because there is in fact distinction between urban and rural youth for instance if you ask a youth in abuja why you engaging in violence his or her reasons will be very different from a youth in kano or kadu now my degree um and and so in abuja they might not cite economic reasons but certainly in the plateau they will tell you it is because we have nothing else to do so that's one thing um but also in in the case of interventions i have a question about how do you engage both these urban and rural youth and you mentioned the lady from mercy co i apologize i don't know your name you mentioned you do work in srilanka and with sports um srilanka's war we know that 40 percent of the carters of the ltt were women um and engaging women in sport activities culturally just not going to lie so how do you work with these cultural issues of excluding a whole group of population and my my last comment is with regards to yali the young african leadership initiative is a fantastic initiative but again it excludes so many youths and there's so many much resentment in rural parts of africa how do we deal with these issues thank you sir hi uh good morning uh thanks thank you get a panelist for uh presentations i thought they were really interesting uh my name is philip you know i'm just a graduate from bigampton university a recent graduate so i'm a greenhorn i guess to this field um but my question is uh concerning the distinctions between regions i guess because you guys are focused on country by country and uh differences but i'm curious if there are like different trends in like africa and the middle east and south asia and also in a broader broader world and um yeah if you could explain like why there are those i think you've given us the topic for another panel um cross regional variation in youth violence patterns um if our panel could could just also very briefly respond with apologies to those who waited to ask questions um okay the the distinction between urban and rural uh was mentioned uh by niche and that's that's extremely important uh there are very different kinds of perspectives and i would say that they they can differ by in terms of urban neighborhood or rural location as well so you can you can boil this down into certain issues that hopefully are are present in both places but certainly the contexts are different the one thing that i would mention that is going to play a big role in rural and urban areas is the issue of class and it seems to me we don't talk about that nearly enough and uh with regards to violence in some situations the profile is that those who are well educated in urban areas in particular are the ones who are resentful and feel quite entitled i mean sometimes immensely entitled if i don't have a job i'm i'm getting a gun this is wrong this system is not you know is against me and i should be you know in the government or something and and you have those situations of uh with elite youth the one thing i found is that a lot of times we have to be careful in my view who we think of as an elite as a youth leader and who who do they lead who represent who do they represent a lot of times elite youth represent other elite youth and and for youth in that country that makes sense uh the the opposite would be i think for on the ground again in urban areas a lot of the where do you have a chance to speak out hip-hop singers are really important and they they they say things that really speak for large large groups of of of youth on the ground thanks mariana very eight words each on on on those issues so frustration on rural and yali i think that there was an effort to reach out as much as possible um to be as inclusive but keep in mind an exchange program you're going to be can't involve all all people so i think we have to use it as an opportunity to make a case for more opportunities on the ground for all young people working with governments and others so it's it's naturally going to be limited how many you can bring here but we need to use it as a chance to advocate for more opportunities on the ground um and again to the urban rule so we're implementing a program in zimbabwe that specifically is looking in one urban area and one rural area and one of the major distinctions is in the rural area there's just less knowledge about opportunities than there are in urban areas and that does drive differences in why young people want to participate in violence thank you hi um my name is annie sheila i work at the state department in the bureau of democracy human rights and labor um and my question i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the use of technology and social media and engaging youth in violence prevention whether it's you know direct engagement through social media and um and messaging or helping to organize and communicate among the grassroots level um obviously it played a big role in the kenyan elections um and has kind of been tattered as a big success but we also see a lot of cases where organizations or groups kind of rely too heavily on technology and think that it's you know a one-stop shop and then it kind of falls flat so i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about um kind of your evaluation of that or your experiences with using technology social media sns that sort of thing good hi um my name is silvia standard i'm with the church of Scientology here in Washington i was actually picked up on a point that mark said that i thought was very interesting that in areas where there's a lot of conflict that the drug trading going into drugs drug abuse is a big issue and i'm curious about if that's i think you mentioned it particularly in Sierra Leone or Kenya i'm not sure which which but i'm interested in how much that is in all the countries and how much is being done about that as an issue related to violence thank you and again just some brief final uh thoughts on the questions so um the issue of drugs we are seeing it in a number of places i was surprised i was in aden and yemen in october and we were seeing much higher rates of drug abuse there as well and what we see and what we're looking for are there and again clusters of negative behaviors where you have issues of violence drugs crime um prostitution are they clustering in some of these areas and what can we do about them so the other question on social media it has to be both in person and using the technology we know that one alone isn't going to work i'll add really quickly on that for i think our ndi colleague may know that there's a session this afternoon at ndi i don't know how open it is but on citizen participation and use of social media i'm not specific to conflict resolution but looking at that role and i and i think that one of the key points is that it can be a tool but it also needs to be linked to on the ground activities um and and i do know that some of the recommendations do mention tapping into um social media given the young people's uh interest but i think we have to pay attention to security concerns too so that's i'm doing work on serious games i can talk to you separately but i think as we engage in the space we need to be very mindful of privacy issues and that we're taking information security into consideration especially in these violent um and challenging environments okay very briefly steve thank you okay um on drugs i've just noted the three ways that it's i think it's growing in importance one is it's um increasingly used um by militia commanders military officials to um get youth angry uh as they say and and then then they send them out to uh to to fight and the this is and this is used with marijuana in many parts of africa right now in congo very heavily in sierra leone and many other places um another aspect is with despair and fallout i find that drug use is increasingly being used uh as well as alcohol and not just by boys um marijuana is really being smoked a lot while in a lot of places and it seems to spread in post-bore areas and the third one is the drug trade um to give you an example in bujumbura the best paying job a boy can get is selling drugs by far and it's also the most dangerous uh but um and what are they selling well there's a lot of marijuana there's a lot of cocaine but increasingly heroin one of the things i'm finding is is it's clear that heroin is expanding in the united states but not just here um and it's really growing in eastern central africa for example uh in ways that are startling and i think that that's something that we um need to keep it here too because it's connected to that not just to their behavior but also to their economy how people are making a living um the last thing about about technology that is a really interesting one i think we need to be cautious about our interest in technology as opposed to how it's being used on the ground not everywhere in africa for example is kenya where it's really sophisticated and they're developing programming that nowhere else in the world actually um in other places having a mobile phone um is a symbol of moving head of being the modern and uh it's not so clear to me that everybody who has a mobile phone actually is using it much but they have one that's called in in eastern convo it's called maisha kizungu it's the white man's life and you you want to you got to have that phone so uh you do a lot of things in order to get that phone uh because it's it's so important particularly for urban youth and i think increasingly for rural youth so the context again is we i guess we're going back to that local context is so important thanks thank you all you know one of the things that i think was most helpful and interesting about our session this morning and i'd like to thank our speakers but also our audience for making it possible is that we've had i think a really constructive but very critical encounter between two very different narratives we've had a conversation about the extent to which donors and implementers are taking seriously the need to look very critically at how they do their work and to understand the field in which they work and to organize programming and strategies of intervention on the basis of evidence and to set aside what doesn't work and prioritize what does and at the same time we've heard from audience members from mark about just how hard it is to make progress in solving these problems even in the face of programming strategies that are far more effective today than they were a generation ago and that leads me to to to conclude that i think we will be back that i think it is important to continue this encounter between these two perspectives because i think it's out of this kind of exchange that we all learn what needs to be done what our priorities need to be and they keep us focused on the need to make real progress on the ground as the critical benchmark for the success of our work so thank you all very much and thank you all very much as well oh sorry i i i missed my critical instruction um there are event feedback cards on the table outside the room please fill them out and give them back to us