 Welcome everybody, this is our book club here at US Institute of Peace, and I'm delighted to welcome you. My name is Nancy Lindborg, and I'm the president here at USIP. And I am absolutely delighted to have a special guest here with us today, somebody who I've known for a very long time and on a topic that is a very high priority for USIP. And I think as well for many of you here in the room, either because this is an issue that must and does inform your work, or because you're a youth leader yourself. And so I'm also particularly delighted to welcome our Yali fellows who are here with us today and our other State Department fellows. You know, as we look out over the world and see the rising number of youth, it's absolutely critical that we figure out how to help those youth create the world that they want to live in, and that all of us want to help them support that work. And Mark Summers has really spent a lot of time thinking and working on this issue. I have a long biography here that talks about all of Mark's accomplishments, and you need to know these, because Mark brings an extraordinary academic background combined with a real understanding of having lived and worked in a lot of places that are suffering from conflict around the world. He's an internationally recognized youth, conflict, development, gender, and education expert. He's taught at Tufts. He's consulted for just about every organization you could think of. Very importantly, he was a Jennings Randolph fellow here at USIP, but he's also a fellow at Woodrow Wilson Center. You know, so you get the idea. It's a very long and illustrious list of accomplishments. He's done a lot of thinking and working on this. But what I want to really say is I first met Mark a lot of years ago when he was just back from, was it Burundi? Kenya as a Peace Corps volunteer. And we were both living in Chicago, and Mark really told these amazing stories of his time as a Peace Corps volunteer, and I know that that experience has really informed his career in terms of understanding that you can't arrive at some of these grand academic conclusions without really spending time with the community, talking to the people whose lives are most deeply affected. And that's really informed a lot of your work and enabled you to have the kind of deep analysis that I think makes a huge difference. And what I really want to say about Mark is that he's the reason that I appreciate the blues. And without Mark giving me a tour of Chicago Blues Clubs, when we both lived there some time ago, I would have a very different experience. And so just like he was a great tour of the Blues Clubs, his book, The Outcast Majority, I think provides a similarly really important blueprint for us to be thinking of these critical issues. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Mark Summers here to USIP's book club. Thanks, Nancy. Thanks very much. That was very, very generous. Yes, Nancy and I go back a long way. I have great memories of those early days. In Chicago, I have great memories of being here at USIP. It was a wonderful place to reflect and think and be stimulated by so many people here. And I do remember, this began in, my fellowship was in 2009 and 2010, that when anything came up about youth, they'd say, well, Mark, can you come to this meeting or Mark, can you, because it was like it was still new. And it was soon after that period where I decided to put in an application for the Wilson Center. And the reason was, is I've been doing this work for quite a long time. And over the years, it's become increasingly clear to me that the current approach will never work, never. It quite often, there's too many people, there's too many young people. We've never seen this many young people in human history. And not only that, that as I'll go into, there's a lot of pressure on people to demonstrate success in these impossible situations. And so a lot of times, people unintentionally or organizations unintentionally don't have much impact or actually can make things worse. Not that anybody wants to. And so that was the motivation to trying to write this book. And I wanted, before I start, I wanted to just point out that it's intentional that there's a woman, a female youth on the cover. And the reason is, is because when we think of youth, we think of male youth, primarily. And what I found in my research is the reason why a male youth is so much a part of the idea of youth is because we're afraid of them. Particularly if they're from Africa or the Middle East. And that comes up over and over and over again, or anywhere in the world if they're living in cities. And so it was important for, I think, for people to see that this is a book about youth and there's a young woman, a female youth on the cover. Of course, with those young whippersnappers who jump in just about any picture in Africa. So I wanted to, again, thank USIP for making this event happen. Because I'm very pleased to be here. So just a little background on the book itself. I guess I started doing this kind of research in 1994. My first job out of grad school was in Rwandan refugee camps right after the genocide in Tanzania. And just from the beginning, there was this overwhelming feeling that in that refugee camp, actually, what do we do? And actually, there was no program for youth. And I was asked by many agencies to take a look at that in 94. So what happens on the other side, whether you have this extraordinary population of young people? International aid tends to, they're very focused on programs. And programs that reach maybe at most 1,000th of 1% of all young people in a country. So in a certain way, we can ask, so what's the point? Well, there's a lot of people very focused, a lot of agencies very focused on youth. And that's new, and that's exciting, and that's important. And I think that the UN declaration, new declaration on youth, peace, and security, 2250 is a big deal to be recognized by the Security Council. This is important. And I think that this declaration is really a breakthrough for us because it puts it on the table that not only the youth need to be a part of discussions, but that fundamentally, most of them are not very violent. And the rationale for violence is actually something that we often don't understand. And usually in wartime situations, it's a tiny fraction of young people who do get involved in war. So the big question that we're not asking is, why are most youths so peaceful? We don't know that because we haven't asked, pretty much. So what goes on with international aid with these big challenges? There's an overwhelming focus on quantitative data, on counting things, on numbers, metrics, indicators, and so forth. And what it does is it often identifies what you're going to do and what it looks like, what the results are. It really defines your world. And often it gives the impression that you can do good development without having any interaction whatsoever with poor people, because the numbers can tell you what to do and how to perform it. So you get these programs like let's do vaccinations in a country, let's do bed nets, let's build a bunch of schools, let's build some clinics, and then that's the program you identify the countable indicators, and that's a good program. Well, there's a gap there, and that's what the book's about. So the structure of the book has to do with who are these people, what's their situation, particularly in youth and war in post-war contexts in Africa. So among the issues that are talked about is gender, failed adulthood, what these kind of remarkable young people, how they get through extraordinary wartime experiences, malnutrition, trauma, sexual and domestic violence, urban migration, and a lot of other issues. So that's the part of the book where I'm trying to give people an understanding of who these people are and what they're going through. And then I jump to, OK, so what's the development approach? It's real different. So in that section, and I'll get to this, the idea is to explore what development looks like and where youth fit or don't fit in the whole equation. And so finally, the book ends with a framework, which many people had asked me and said, OK, you're so smart. What should we do about it? And that was a challenge. I mean, these issues are big. And as I'll get to later, I'm actually quite optimistic about the future. And the reason is that I interviewed a lot of people from donor agencies, implementing agencies, development experts, evaluation experts, youth experts. And I think people are very aware of the fact that the system isn't really working for most young people. It's really obvious. And there's a frustration about that. And that's what gives me hope, because there's a growing awareness that we need to do to work on this in a better way, in a more effective way. And I think, as I said, there's more and more agencies who are realizing, and now with the new declaration at the UN, that we need to do something different. So this is an important time. This is actually a very exciting time for thinking about these issues. So the starting point of the book is the following irony. That youth are demographically dominant in these countries. And this is across Africa. This is across the Middle East. This is many, many countries in the world. And yet most of them see themselves as members of an outcast minority. Hence the name of the book, The Outcast Majority. So our reality is that we all work and live in a sea of youth exclusion. And our main challenge is not what to do with all this huge population. It's youth alienation. That's our challenge. And here are some questions that can come out of that. Do mainstream civil society and elite youth leaders really represent non-elite youth majorities? If most youth don't feel they're members of a community, what does a community mean? What is a community? If you look at youth themselves, you'll see that they develop their own communities. But usually development, often the training, is that the implicit idea in a lot of training is that communities are functional. And that people belong. So you go to elders in villages, for example, to talk about what to do about the youth. And in my experience in doing that for so much, there's a lot of elders who don't want a lot of those bad boys there and the bad girls, particularly after war, because they're not going to do what they're told to do anymore. That's over. That's history. And so there can be real challenges and tensions in these what we think of as a community. And often, we don't even think of urban neighborhoods as communities. So those are a couple of questions. And here's a little bit just about the structure of the research. It comes from interviews over many, many years with young people in what is it, 13 countries affected by conflict in Africa and then refugees in a lot of countries, Gambia, Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda. Interviews, as I said, with donor officials and implementing agency officials and people considered experts in the field of youth or evaluation or development. Interviews with African government officials and then really hundreds of publications to get through the sort of the breadth of what's covered in the book and do a lot of reading. So here are some ideas about youth that are featured in the outcast majority. The context of youth exclusion, that should be our starting point. And of course, the starting point, I think, is a useful one that we got a lot of young people and more than we've ever seen, as I mentioned. Then there is something that comes out in the book that I call systematic exclusion. And systematic exclusion has to do with how systems just through the function of these systems leave most young people out, schools. So in most countries in Africa, it's rare for a young person to get into a secondary school. Now, there are some exceptions. South Africa, Kenya, DRC have fairly high numbers of young people who can get into secondary school. But most of Africa, even in primary school, you know you're not going. And so the ideas of advancement aren't there for you. And there's a realization of this for a lot of young people, as they've explained in many places, at a very young age. And then there's cultural exclusion. Now, the main issue that I talk about with regards to this is how hard it is to become recognized as an adult in Africa. It is extremely difficult. Expectations, the prerequisites, are very difficult in a farming environment, farming culture. You're expected to have land. You're expected to build a house as a boy, a young male youth. You have to often play a bride price. You have to have a marriage in a mosque or a church. And then you have to have children with your wife. And you have to be able to support those children. Masculinity is a very, very fragile identity. You can feel like a man and lose your job, and then you don't feel like one. Femininity is not by comparison. And it is very difficult. Now, for a boy in West Africa, how the heck is he going to get any land? It isn't there. How can you build a house? You need a job. You need money. You need for roofing. For example, it's very expensive. How can you do this? So again, young people get this sense that they can't hit those requirements. And for a female youth, if you can't marry, you're not seen as a woman in a lot of cultures. So for them, for female and male youth, there's this realization that they're looked on quite often as failures. Now, in some countries, they really do humiliate these young people pretty regularly. In other places, they don't. But the loss of identity, or the identity issue of being kind of a failure, leads to a lot of outcomes. Class inequality, emasculation, unmarried motherhood, which is extremely common, I've realized over the years. These are female youth who, at some point, have become mothers. And they're not recognized as women. In some countries, it's not really clear what you even call them. Because they're not supposed to exist, traditionally. And now they exist in huge amounts, in huge numbers. Domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse. This is not just male youth. Marijuana smoking seems to be on the rise stratosphericly in some places. In a big, big, big way, in a lot of places. Prostitution, if you think about it, if a young man is in a city and he can't marry, how's he going to have sexual relations? Well, he can date somebody, but at some point, the young lady is going to say, OK, after this is a nice Coca-Cola, where is this going? He doesn't have a job to be able to support her, in a lot of cases. It's very intimidating. So quite often, the rationale is go to a prostitute. Now, there's a demand for prostitutes because of this failed adulthood is what I realized. On the female side, if you are an unmarried mother and you have kids, one thing I've learned in research in many cities is you can bring your kids to work if you're a prostitute. And it's a very common job for female youth. In Bujumbura, for example, some female youth work part-time on the weekends to get school fees, to pay for a secondary school. And then urban migration. If you feel that in a village you're going to be seen as a loser, then the idea of going into the city is pretty attractive. There's also a lot of really interesting. Cities are interesting. You're not cut off. Youth all over the world want to connect to other youth. That's a fact. Well, cities are the place to do it. And for example, for youth in cities, how can they get their voice out? What I found is, quite often for leadership, one place we're not often looking is hip-hop artists. They're usually the only people in a city that are able to say, this is who I am. And it's increasingly female youth as well. This is my life. So I think there was a song in Tanzania in Dar es Salaam called Maisha, which just described a guy looking for a job a day in my life, a day in my life. And he keeps getting told, you're a thief, get out of here, day of my life, day of my life. So this is this sort of new world that youth are sort of creating. After a war and during a war, people go to cities in huge numbers. When they ever find out, when they ever start counting numbers in South Sudan, I have this theory that Juba is going to be the fastest-growing city in the world, especially with all the instability now. What about the war-affected youth? There's a lot about this in the book. And I'm going to just mention that one of the challenges of working with youth affected by war is that they hide who they are. They hide what they've done. They hide their physical or psychological challenges. And they also hide the talents they've gathered in the war. If you're a young boy in a village, like the oldest son in a refugee camp, your parents might tell you, look, you better get back to that. Go across the border and tell us who's on our land, because we need to know. And you have to figure it out and hope you don't get caught and killed. And so some of these kids are able to do amazing things. There is for in many non-state actors, there's no more valuable asset that you can have besides a girl or a female youth. Is there anything that they can't do? I'll give you an example. They're the best spies. You put them behind enemy lines and nobody will suspect them. And that is a very common vocation for female youth and girls who are abducted or join militias during war. So there's a further irony also, which to me is really quite tragic that I think we really need to listen to with regards to these commanders. Military commanders who abuse and exploit young people are the same ones who recognize their talent and potential. So in a village, kids often say, they just say you're too young, you can't do it. When you get abducted, that commander knows you can do anything. You can lead people in the field, you can be incredibly brave, you can be a spy. There are all these different leadership positions you can carry out. My god, Charles Taylor, so many of his officers were children, not just the troops. So these are remarkable young people. And they have to hide all this skill and savvy. I mean, the tenacity of people. I think we like to think about youth as resilient. That's so obvious, right? But tenacity is what so many people have. And an ingenuity that is really quite extraordinary. Now, of course, after a war, how can you go back if you've had these amazing experiences? It's impossible. Why do we expect them to want to go back? The world's changed. And I find it so interesting that programs for ex-combatants so often take place in rural areas. Where are most ex-combatants after a war in the city? Are they going to go back? No, most of them, for very good reasons. So it's complicated. And the idea of the book is to try to understand it from the perspective of these young people that we're so concerned about. And also, in many cases, so afraid of. So what's the development response? Well, I'm going to just take out. There's a mention three challenges that came out of the analysis of reading a lot and also interviewing a lot of people. So the first challenge is that development really and governments are, I think, in terms of sectors. So you put on your sector blind, right? If you do education, if you do democracy and governance, if you do health, whatever it is, that's your way of seeing the world. So what they call stovepipes or silos. So this predetermines everything you do. It predetermines your priorities. It directs investment in action. OK, well, there's a challenge there when we're dealing with youth during and after wars and elsewhere as well. Often, and development work, I mean, these are people that are making decisions in faraway headquarters, right? And quite often, they do their analysis with their data and say, OK, development, we need to work on developing the formal economic sector, which in many countries after war is tiny and super corrupt. And you're not going to find many female youth in the formal sector. And agriculture, right? There's a lot of arable land in Africa. People should be farming, OK? My son's 26. Using the word should with him, it still doesn't work. So what are youths doing? The opposite. They're in cities and they're in the informal sector. So it's the opposite of what the development planners have done. So of course, it's not working very well. It's the predetermined siloing idea without knowing much about your target group. So a second challenge is this is really something that I didn't realize until I did interviews, this enormous pressure to demonstrate success. And to give you a sense of this, this is just one example. This is on the website for the Canadian government. They had an aid effectiveness agenda. And on the website, I don't know if it's still there, but it was, it says that their aid effectiveness agenda delivers results and demonstrates value for every dollar invested in international development. They make no mistakes with poor people. Are you kidding me? That's amazing. OK, so what's underneath that, this idea? And I mean, don't our officials feel it implementing partners, you know, agencies really feel this pressure. So what happens? Well, one thing that people told me, this isn't something that people are particularly proud of, but you have to deal with this environment of pressure, is you quietly put elite youth into your youth programs, because they're more functional. And sometimes you're expected to show positive impact of your program in the first quarter of your program. Now, this is really impossible if you don't even know much about your target group. And what I heard over and over again is that the same youth get into all the programs, or the well-adjusted ones get in. This isn't that, again, unintentionally, there are a lot of consequences. First of all, you're demonstrating inequality and favoritism for the fortunate few. Secondly, it's positioning donors and implementers with those in power. Now, most youth, the status quo most clearly does not work for them. The status quo, a few more jobs, is not going to answer the challenges for youth today. Okay, so usually governments are not that popular with youth, because they're not doing much for them. They want their vote, and then that's it. That's what often youth say, particularly in cities. And often when you're focusing on elite youth, it's the connected youth who get in, the ones connected to people in the government, people connected to the chief. I remember in Sierra Leone, there were some people working for an agency who were Sierra Leonean and explaining to me, and they didn't understand the problem. They said, look, of course, the chief supporters gets into the youth program. He doesn't have money to give them. He gets them into programs, and that's how it works in Sierra Leone. What's the problem with that? I mean, there was no, this is the logic of a program. This is what they're for, from the perspective of the Sierra Leonean implementers. And so I would point out that that is problematic. There were a lot of people when this youth program was going on that were desperate for this program. And so the potential to have a negative impact with a successful program is actually quite high, because if the supporters of the chief then get a job, this is really crushing for a young woman who's working in a market, plating hair with kids all around her, for example. These are people that really need a training program. They're not getting in, and in the system, they have no shot. And so this fuels fatalism. This fuels frustration, and it happens a lot. A third challenge is this, as I've said, this really remarkable focus on the quantitative in collecting numbers, metrics, correlations, indicators, outputs, statistics, and so on, to identify problems and determine the effectiveness of initiatives that I mentioned. And again, it's important to realize when you have this kind of environment that's sort of create, that you create with numbers and not with people, it does give the impression that you don't need to interact with people to decide on how to help them. Let's be honest, you know, in a lot of countries, educated people make decisions for uneducated people. Why would you ask a person without education about anything, they don't have any education, what do they know? They have a saying in Central Africa, people normally, development agencies normally train elite people, and what will you do with that information? And it's very common to hear people say, I will inform the population. That's a very common phrase in Rwanda and Burundi. Yeah, well, you're not very popular with the population, but that's another question. So what do we do about this? Before, I have a few ideas that I'm taken out of the framework from the end of the book. I just want to revisit this idea, which if we can just try to keep present is youth are demographically dominant, yet they see themselves as members of an outcast minority. And then what about the development approach? Well, it predetermines action in advance. It doesn't draw, in most cases, on the perspectives and priorities of excluded youth majorities, right? The priorities of elite youth are not the same as non-elite youth, and quite often the two groups are very much in conflict with each other. And often don't like each other, and they have different priorities. And it isn't as if the masses of non-elite youth in a country, which is like 90% of youth, have uniform ideas about what's needed. These programs tend to reach tiny, tiny proportions of the youth population. They're under enormous pressure to demonstrate very quick success. They unintentionally demonstrate nepotism and alignment with unpopular governments, and they rely, as I've said, overwhelmingly on quantitative data. So what do we do about this? Well, there's a lot of details in the framework, which took a lot of, there were a lot of drafts to even try to begin to think about, so what do we do practically, having worked with agencies and interviewed governments and having an understanding of how things function, what can we do? So here are four ideas. The first is to start with an assessment of excluded youth lives. Now, this is the majority of youths in a country, and in a post-war situation, it's really important to understand this. It's important to realize that youth, either even if they're not in cities, many in rural areas are thinking about how do I get there? Or they have an orientation that really tries to connect them to urban youth, using the language, listening to the songs, having dressing like in urban youth. In East Africa, you know, they have, if a kid is a male youth is really oriented the city, he's known as Citiboy. And a lot of kids in the rural areas say want to be known as Citiboy also, because that's the idea. So there are some questions that I put down, what can we find out if we do assessments with excluded youth lives? And this has to include quite a bit of qualitative research of conversations. But we ask in questions, what are their priorities? What factors promote cultural exclusion? What factors systematically exclude youth? And what programs and policy reforms have the best chance of advancing youth inclusion? A second idea is to advocate for policies that reverse youth exclusion. Now when you do your research, there are gonna come up a lot of ideas, you're not gonna be able to do them all, that are excluding youth. One of the things that I find, I think we really do have to change is we have to put more value on policy advocacy, reforming policies, reforming practices. If you interview urban youth and they don't talk about harassment from the police, I will be amazed. I would be astonished. And the police issue is all over the world. We know it's in America. Think about it, in cities, most people where they live, it's illegal. It's informal housing. Most people, what they do to make a living is illegal, technically, it's in the informal sector. The openings for harassment, corruption, and so forth, is so enormous. And there's no checks on this kind of predatory behavior from government, or even, and often not government, people who are quite powerful. This sort of thing happens every day. And it's a huge, huge problem. If you are, there was a woman I interviewed, a female youth and unmarried mother in Kigali, and she was explaining that the only thing she could do is sell umbrellas. And I mean, you know, the police and then these other defense force people, they knew her and there she is with her umbrellas and she doesn't have permission to do it. So she'd have to give them money or she'd have to take their own umbrellas. And I said to her, do you have an option? And the answer was no, she didn't have an option. And so she had to keep doing this and hope that she could get by a few days without having somebody take the umbrellas away or take her money away. So these kinds of, this kind of predatory behavior is enormous in youth lives. And to pretend that it's not there is really, or to not look there, or to focus in a very narrow way on programs, it's gonna not, you know, I think it's a missed opportunity. Quite often it's only outsiders who can say anything about these issues. You know, if you're a youth in a city and you say, look, we got a problem with the police, you might get arrested, right? But if you're a foreigner saying this and talking to government officials in a proper way, you have a chance. And here's a benefit we have. This is why governments will listen. In my experience, quite often, not everybody, but quite often because they have no solutions for youth and they're really afraid of young men. Particularly the ones in cities. So it's an opening. It's not a negative thing. We can turn that into something that that, I think that gives us a chance to have real conversations about female youth as well. About what the problems are and how to create more stability in the society, in the country. You have to have those discussions. And I think that's something that international agencies need to really take on because it's much too dangerous in many countries to even think of doing this kind of advocacy. It's possible. It happens. But it's difficult. So a third idea is to, I'm not saying don't do programs, but established programs that address excluded youth priorities. Now this is hard to do. Here are four questions to think about. Who will you target as your program participants and what's your rationale? One of the things that's quite amazing is how so many programs don't really have much of a rationale for targeting at all. Strategic targeting is often missing, okay? Now if you're gonna target a tiny number of people in a giant city, how will you demonstrate some degree of inclusion? We have to change our evaluations. You have to see what the impact of a youth program is on people not in the program. If you have a successful program, it makes people feel worse because they can't get in. That's not a successful approach in my view. And in the view of most youth in the area, evaluations that are very focused on, the ones with the smiling youth and I love the program and what I need is more training and that kind of thing. Well, what about everybody who can't get in? Have you demonstrated unintentionally exclusion through your program? It's not something that we try to do, we wanna do, but it can happen that context is a sea of exclusion. And so we have to be aware of this and do our best to demonstrate some degree of inclusion. And how will your program address the priorities of the target group? They might not be in your sector. Youth don't live in sectors, no one does. Be, that's the whole point of research to be surprised. And how will you minimize the negative impact on youth that who can't participate in your program? And one of the tricks of this is to try to have discussions. And there are some ideas on how to do this in the book that in chapter six, the end of the book that might be useful. Finally, if you remember anything at all, here's a rule of thumb. Find out who the bad youth are, the ones they call the really bad boys and the bad girls and address their priorities with policy advocacy and programs. So I'll leave it there and thank you very much for being so patient. Thanks very much. So now we'll open up to questions from people in the room but also from people on Twitter using hashtag music quality and we'll have to speak into the microphone for the webcast. Oh, right, for the webcast. Hey Mark, my name's Darren. Thanks for coming and being with us today. It's been wonderful. I think you said something about masculine identity as being fragile, which I found really interesting. And I'd love for you to elaborate on that a bit by connecting it to policies and systems that are set up to exclude youth. And what I was hearing in that a little bit was a generational issue as well that taps into this masculine fragility where older men are in large part making policies that in some way impact younger men and maybe intentionally or unintentionally they're excluding, did you in your research or in interviews pick up any of a conflict that exists across between generations of older men and young men in terms of older men feeling threatened by new ideas or challenged in their masculinity by a younger generation of young men with their ingenuity, tenacity as you described it. I can see that. Thanks Darren, that's a great question. The issue of masculine identity is fragile. I don't think there's any religion in the world where there's the concept of father earth doesn't exist. Mother earth, femininity you realize is rock solid. When you become a woman, you can't lose that in most cultures, right? I think in every culture. Once you become a woman, you're a woman. Nobody's gonna challenge that. What about masculinity? Okay, well, when I was teaching at the Fletcher School about these issues, I would put on the song by Muddy Waters, blues man, as Nancy mentioned, I like blues and it's called Managed Boy and it's a grown man. He's like 60 and he's 70 singing the song about I'm a man. Isn't that a man? Sexual prowess, I can make love to a woman in five minutes time, make that a man and everybody goes yeah. I can do all these things because I'm a man. You have to constantly prove that you're a man in most societies. You can be doing really well, you lose your job. Are you a man? Maybe, sort of, right? And that's in America, that's all over. So there's this insecurity and this tenuousness about being recognized. Now, how does this play into the kinds of systems that I've been talking about? It's really hard to become recognized as a man in Africa and in the Middle East. So, and I think in many parts of the world. And so with regards to the generational issue, I think one of the things that international agencies can do is have a conversation about this because I do not think that the older generation wants to destroy their children and their younger generation, but it is. I mean, partially it has to do with the demography. If you're supposed to build a house, well, you don't have a lot of land like before. If you're supposed to pay the bride price or not, if you're supposed to pay for the official wedding to be recognized, is this even possible with most kids? Probably not. And I find in doing research, which is actually was discussed in a special report for USIP a few years ago with a colleague, Peter Juven. And we looked at asking questions, the same questions to youth in Rwanda and Burundi. Peter was doing it in Burundi, I was doing it in Rwanda. And one of the things we found is the expectations were about the same, but culturally, Burundian older generation was much more accepting of youth who were struggling to become men. Not so in Rwanda. Rwanda, it was a routine and I saw it. I mean, it's not like it was hidden. It was routine to humiliate not only male youth who couldn't become men, but poor men. And there's a word called umutindi, which means really a desperately destitute person. And quite often you can measure manhood in Rwanda and Burundi by, have they finished their roof? And it can take a whole lifetime to finish a roof. So I was talking to a couple of guys and they were talking about, you know, I need 800 roof tiles for my roof and I have 400. Another one said I have 500. These guys were in their 40s. And while we were talking, an old man with a cane was walking by and he said something about me and they said, you see? You see what they're calling me? This happens every day. And what can I do? I can't do anything about it. But it's a burning humiliation. And so is everywhere as rough for growing up as Rwanda? Fortunately not. Is everywhere as accommodating as Burundi? I don't know. I think in a place like Sierra Leone, they've just given up. I think one of the things that's happened in my experience in West Africa is that the chances of being recognized as an adult seems to, for youth, seems to be so accepted that it's impossible that it's not really much of an expectation anymore. It's just not gonna happen. And so I've found more open discussion in my experience in West Africa than other parts of Africa about this issue. But to give an example from another place, there was a study during the Intifada of male youth throwing stones in Palestinians, throwing stones at the Israelis. And this person did research and found out that what they really wanted to do was to be arrested because they'd be detained for 30 days, the boys throwing the stones. And then they would come back as a hero. They stood up against the oppression of the opposition and they came back and they felt like men and there would be big celebrations for them. And this was a way, this is one of the things, and I don't do not think that this is what the Israelis had intended, but it was a way of showing that you were a man because the traditional ways of proving manhood weren't there anymore. And so war can be a way to replace that to create new ways to do it. Certainly, if you can't, some people have interviewed male youth who are in armies and one of the reasons people join is because you can't get married. But with a gun, with money, as a soldier, you have a different identity and you have a better chance. So anyway, any other questions? Thank you very much, all right. I'm Phillip McEwire, I'm from Sierra Leone, but I've been living and getting for the past 20 years. And I'm so glad that you know much about West Africa. There is something you mentioned about policymaking, especially for your development. I would like to know what are the strategies or the methods that will be used to put these policies in place because some West African countries, they don't have much idea about policy. You see, that's something so bad. And then for many people, the system of policy is now that it is gradually increasing. And there is something also I would like to mention as maybe as a contribution in the area of polygamy, especially in Guinea. This is another factor that is leading youth to go, let's say to go on the wrong side of view. Imagine a man marrying four wives and you have to satisfy all these women. And sometimes the women are faced with competition in childbearing. And now you're a man having four wives and each of them giving you six kids, six children. And then with too much of maybe suppression on you, you found earlier death among men and you see women left out withered. And then you see most of these children, they grew and hating one another. And then they are led to go on the street or maybe to drain gang groups to be in different negative groups just to be found somewhere where they would be called these are the problem in them. I like the key problems, the main problems of West Africa and then I believe these are the things that we should stand to fight against. And then what would you give me some key advices because I work with youth, especially in peace building, youth empowerment, skills training and other programs. What would be some advices that you give to me that I can implement to contribute to fight against the problem that is growing among youth in my community? Thank you. Thank you, Phillip. Strategies and methods to put policies in place in West Africa because policy implementation is not an area of expertise in some governments. That's true. I think a lot of people would agree with you on that. I think in some countries, if there's pressure to have a new kind of law from the international community on gender issues or something, a new way of thinking for people in the government, in my experience sometimes what happens is a law is passed and then it's forgotten pretty much. And so that's not really an authentic way of working on change because I think you have to understand not just the policies, but what's going on on the ground might not be a policy. It might be a practice. As I mentioned, the police behavior is a good example. Or it might be polygamy is one that needs real focus, which is another one you mentioned. And I'm glad you mentioned the polygamy issue because I think we have a particular new population of young people that we really need to be concerned about. And those are the children of unmarried mothers or of widows who are really on their own. And don't have much expectation of advancement from their mothers because it's just not happening. And the thing is when fewer and fewer people can actually marry, this population just keeps growing. And one of the biggest problems we have is we didn't even know about them. I mean, I think is, but if we know about them, what do we do? And to follow that trajectory of these kinds of young people, which Phillip you're talking about is really something to be aware of because a lot of them, they can get into a lot of trouble. So advice on youth empowerment and peace building. Well, first of all, I wanna go back to something I said at the beginning. Why are most youths so peaceful? How come you go to Sierra Leone during the war? How come so few youths joined? That government before the war was so unpopular. And it went, especially in Freetown, it was incredibly violent towards young people, male youth in particular. How come most of them didn't join? How come most of them that rebellion only involved a few people? And how come most of those who rebelled had to be abducted first? Why do we see in what was the movie about South blood diamond? The impression you get in the movie is that every Sierra Leonean male youth is out of his mind a drug addict and has a gun and is violent and irrational. There's a stereotype there and it's a scary one. And it isn't true. And so I think my advice would be to first find out how in situations of real violence, how is it that female and male youth are able to stay peaceful? With that, there's a natural moral sense that so many young people have. I think most young people in the world have this. And I think that that's an important starting point for peace building. This feeling that even if you could make money if you joined a criminal gang or if you joined a militia, I won't do it. That's not right. And I'm gonna live in a situation of real degradation and be humiliated by the police or what have you. I still won't do it. And I think there's something heroic about this that we're not recognizing. And I think the more that we do, then the more we realize that this peace building idea is just recognizing what young people are doing already, in most cases. And I also think it's important to realize how come the few young people that do join military groups or gangs, why? What's their rationale? We need to understand that better. They're usually pretty good. There's usually, in the sense good, in the sense that it makes sense why they did it. I think we all wish that they hadn't, but there's a rationale there that we have to understand. If we're gonna try to draw those people back from violence, we have to understand why they're engaged in the first place. And I think you'll find for a lot of the boys that it comes down to a lot of times to this issue of emasculation, that their family was humiliated and they were powerless to do anything, for example. That's a common one, common rationale. And so they joined to fight back to, for the honor of their family and the fact that they were powerless at that period. And so now I'm gonna do something. And in peace building, is there another way to deal with that humiliation that doesn't involve violence? I think that's our challenge. Dave Peterson, National National University. I'm very interested in this issue of elite youth versus masses, I guess you might say. Something I've been wrestling with for a few years now. With the endowment, we make small grants, a lot of organizations, a lot of youth organizations. Obviously most of these are elite groups, not just secondary, but typically they're college graduates that are leading these organizations. But I wonder if you're appreciating the agency of young people in Africa. I've been following, for example, the Yanomar in Senegal or Blysepwayen in Burkina Faso, the Lucha in BRC, there's a lot of very powerful youth movements in Africa these days. And what I'm very intrigued with is how do you engage with these movements? And of course I'm in a silo with democracy and governance and I suspect that limiting inevitably but you didn't mention anything about social media. And that's certainly one thing that seems to be very powerful phenomenon, especially with youth these days in Africa. And I mean, I was just in Burkina Faso a couple months ago and talking to the young people there about how they essentially overthrew the dictator. Social media was very important. It was led by musicians. I mean, I think your point about the hip hop artists is very important. In a lot of these countries, it's quite amazing how huge a following these musicians have and their ability to mobilize thousands of youth. And I think, say, maybe some of these old leaders are afraid and they maybe have good reason to be afraid. And it's not just the young men, it's the young women, but I really feel like I'm concerned that you're underestimating the power of youth in Africa. I think the question for us is how do we engage with it? Okay, well I don't think I am. I think that in a short presentation I can't cover all things, but I tried to focus on this issue of tenacity earlier on to give a sense and maybe agency would be another way. But I just find that so many youths, regardless of what they have to deal with, are just, they're unsinkable. And so, of course, there's agency and in a very powerful way. And I think in a much more important way than we realize because you can't go back to something that no longer exists. I mean, this idea, when we talk about after war, we want to reintegrate youth. The problem with that is the word, reintegrate. No, it's integrate. You can't go back, reintegrate into what. A lot of times it was the structures that existed, the practices that existed before the war that was part of the problem. So the issue is integration, not reintegration. And understanding how youth are organizing themselves is a big part of that. I think one of the reasons why hip hop isn't recognized as much by the international communities because they don't like it. And you have to spend some time to understand what young people are saying in another language and so forth. But I've been really struck when I've said many times, a starting point is when you go to a country, find out who the big people are and buy their, the people that the kids are listening to and buy their CDs. Start listening. Put it on in a taxi. That's the taxi driver that translated for you. Everybody knows the songs. They like them, they don't like them. Find out what they're talking about. Find out what those issues are. Find out. I'll give you a great example when we talk about youth leaders. If, in my view, an authentic youth leader is you have to find out who they are. Sierra Leone is a good example. I've spent quite a bit of time there. There's this remarkable musician named Emerson Bochari. Emerson had a song called Yesterday Better Past Today. And I remember I would ask youth when I was there, when that song was really popular, and I'd say, how did they, you know, how are you? How's the day? And male and female youth would say, ah, yesterday better past today. Now there is an influential young man. There is an influential youth. There is a youth leader. He had another song named Bobo Bele, which is about corruption. And this is in Sierra Leone, which is a big problem. Every politician talks about it. It's a big, big problem. This is a brave young person. And the respect he had for talking about these issues was extraordinary. And I don't know if he was really recognized as a youth leader, but let me tell you, I'd never found one during that time who was more of a youth leader than Emerson Bochari. And the music's great also. But so there's an example, I think. I do not talk about the various movements that you're making reference to. I'm talking about more on the level of the individual. And then in the separation of elite and non-elite, often is very, is very distinct. And a concern I have is elite youth often, the ones with education are less threatening, you know? Agencies will say, for the next meeting, we need a youth voice, we have to have a youth voice. Normally, they get somebody who speaks French or English and then is very eloquent and is very elite. Now, is this somebody who is aware of the views of non-elites as well? Well, sometimes. But in my research, I found that quite often that what elite youth are talking about are not the issues that non-elite youth are talking about. And that there really is a difference socially between the two groups. And so some youth NGOs and movements try to make that connection, but others don't. And let's be honest, you know, there's a lot of unemployed elite youth and they want jobs and they want access to education and what's wrong with that. So it's not to denigrate non-elite youth, but we're not talking about many people proportionally. And my concern is that we keep, we have to start thinking about the grand, the larger population. We have to be aware of outcast youth majorities because they're really driving the future of Africa on their own and we have to catch up with them and then figure out how to support them. Hi, Mark. Thanks very much. I think my question, but then you also mentioned there's always two to facilitate policy issues that are really important to young people. But, you know, given that as you say, the young people do really have issues that they care about, they perhaps want to relate or are passionate about taking the lead in changing, how do you think besides perhaps putting diplomatic pressure on these countries, how do you think they're going to empower youth within these communities to engage politics as a way and can start to waste it to address these issues despite the fact that they are currently, you know, perhaps advocating for the needs as you say. Oh, Mike, a great question. And I think the starting point is to be, come to learn about the context and what's important and you're presuming that politics is going to be one of those. Maybe. Or maybe defined in a way that's very different than the way that you would come into that. And as I said, you know, prepare to be surprised. And that's a good thing to find out. Does a female youth who's working as a prostitute with two young kids, does she really feel that it's possible for her to influence things politically? Depends. In a situation where there's really punishing a authoritarian kind of situation going on, you know, is that what's most important? Maybe not. And also, you know, putting your head up can get you in trouble. And so there might be other things, other priorities that are important. And this is again this issue that you're coming in with NDI thinking about politics. And that's the way the development world works. But the starting point is to understand what those priorities are. And I think priorities are really important. You know, as somebody who's worked a lot on education, what I've realized is there's a big difference between values and priorities. A value is, do you want to go to school? Yes, I want to go to school. Can you go to school? That's another issue, right? I want to go to secondary school. Is it possible? Well, you know, talking to me, you're a nice white man. You have money? Why don't you give me money? I'll go to secondary school. But beyond that, you know, there's no system. There's no way to make that happen. And so what does a young people person want? What must they do? What drives them? What are their needs in these situations? Based on their analysis, not ours. And so I think that's the starting point. And, you know, it could be based, you know, we might know, have a sense going in, but we might also be surprised. So that's really, it's the learning environment. We have to know about young people before we start talking about this. And, you know, think twice next time when you say the youth need this and the youth need that. We're talking about millions and millions and millions and millions of people in every country. Who are you talking about? And my experiences is that when you say the youth need this and the youth need that, elite male youth generally benefit programmatically in terms of access, in terms of recognition. Which gets to the issue of social media. Social media is something to study. In some countries it's really just elite youth doing it and usually male youth, not necessarily. Kenya's a good example of all kinds of people using social media. So it depends on the issue of social media. It is important. In some countries, I mean, in Burundi, I think five percent of Burundians have cell phones. I'm not sure. Four to five percent of the country has, the population has access to electricity. In South Sudan, I don't know what it is right now. You know, it's not just having a cell phone, it's charging it. So, and then having, you know, being able to buy the units to use it. So how many people are using it? What's the profile of the people using it? I think to assume that everybody is a mistake. Africans don't, in general, don't use the internet. It's mobile phones. That's what people want. And they have an incredible significance symbolically for people. Just to give you an example, in, I've noticed this in Burundi, in traditional dances, women usually in their right hand will hold a, when they're dancing, a handkerchief. And then when they get hot, they just go like that and they keep dancing. And that handkerchief is right there. What's in their right hand now? A cell phone. Thank you very much. I'm really happy with the book and the introduction you have made, because this really is like expressed exactly what's happened in my community in Sudan. We have used, no matter what you did, no matter what education that you have, you still is like what you know. You don't have to worry about it. Then about the song is like, this is a new platform that we use in Sudan. It's a type of song that people, especially the elders, will not listen to it because they think it's like against everything. And it's way over. We call it, it's like aghaniz zang. It's like, zang is like when we are in corner, being caught in the corner, and how you try to get out of it. And then the other type is iroba. We call it iroba. Iroba is like half quarter of one dollar. So it's like, this is what you, as a youth, this is what you worth. It's like this character. So you don't have a voice. And what has happened in that song, like they express exactly what's happened, the situation when you go out of your home, what the problem that you face, and how you go about it. And then it's like, we use it as like father, as a government, and then the suit, as like where you live in the house, and how you try to get out of it. And we also use social media as Facebook or WhatsApp, exactly, to express the problem that we go about it, and how we should go forward. But still in terms of policy, we don't have strong policies. And also youth, they protest, they tell their opposite thinking about what is happening, but still there is no way for words to achieve this like public policy or something. I found one good solution is that the informal sector. I believe that if all youth have taken care of the informal sector in terms of business and may have a job, and also to thanks the informal sector in terms of like having policy within, also help each other and try to go ahead in the business that will help a lot of like formulate the formal sector. Also in Sudan, we use education as the ultimate goal. It's not a tool to use it and reform policies or to advocate about. The last things I want to talk about is the single mom. Single mom in our community has been totally left behind as usual. Now there is a new role, say that mom are strong, mom doesn't give up. Why? Because of the children that you have. That means you have to work harder to formulate yourself and be more strong and forget yourself in terms to achieve things for your babies. But my concern is that there is no institute or organization that's worked on this woman to tell them there is something better behind all of what you're doing. There is your reflection in the mirror. So this is actually the issues that we face in our community. And then the last things is the competition between you and yourself as female and male. Because for us, as you said, that's male. They try to prove their self to the community. They're becoming a man or having a man within them for us. It's like how to get the first wife. Once you get the first wife, that means the fellow is very easy, very easy. Even if you don't have money, you don't have nothing. Once you have gotten the first wife because it's very expensive, then you can get the second, the third and fourth. Very easy. So being a woman also, youth woman, try to prove yourself and have education and then have a job, that means some sort of how competition to the man because as a woman you have to really work it hard on it. And that's create a gap between youth as female and male. And for us, we don't direct male to work harder or to improve themself, but we direct women to go back to the kitchen. Like why you are going out, this is not your place, why you competed, being a competitor with a man, he needs to work hard so that he can formulate a family and being ahead of the family. But you are just a wife, you're supposed to support them. And what has happened when you go to the kitchen? You don't have that money, you don't have anything to cook. So still you need to go back again to the street and like, or the market business to have that, at least that amount of food and come back home and cook it. So this is also another problem. Like we are youth all, female and male, we still, we need to work together. And most of the time, youth solve the problem of there being youth and they don't have a voice by getting married early. So if you are a man or a woman, you get married, okay, that the time you will still have a voice and be respected in the community. But we forget that the problem comes out of marriage if the two people are, they don't know really exactly what's marriage about. Thank you. Wow, thank you very much. I mean, one of the things I'm thinking about for like a broader audiences that came up in the research is there is an unresolved tension between youth work and gender work. And what I found in interviewing people because this is something, you have all these great reports, but the reality of development, the development reports from agencies and so forth, but the reality of development is not in those reports is what everyone said, don't read our reports, let me tell you what's really going on. That kind of thing would happen in interviews. And the issue of gender and youth is really interesting. What's the subtext? What is it? What do they really mean? Gender, adult youth is what a lot of practitioners, donors and so on said. What does youth mean? Male youth. Gosh, that's funny. Female youth don't exist in either. And so that's something for us to really realize. I think what happens is that they, when they have children, they're seen just as young mothers. Now young mothers aren't as important as older mothers in terms of NGOs and so forth, organizing. And in terms of youth, it's the male youth who generally get the focus. Again, quite often, because they're the ones we're afraid of. They're the ones we're concerned about. And so you're very right that female youth are often left behind. Now increasingly, they become, they're becoming unmarried mothers. I think it's important to realize for a female youth in a lot of societies in Africa, and I think quite far beyond, you have a very, very, very narrow timeframe in which you can actually marry. By the time you're 24 or 25, in a lot of places, you're too old. No one's gonna marry you. You become an old lady, like a spinster. In a lot of countries, unless you're quite, maybe if you have high education, it's different. But on the ground for most, once you hit 25 in a lot of places, you're old lady in terms of how you're seen culturally. And so the pressure on these young people, you know, you're waiting to get married, to who? And I think that's one of the reasons why in places where there's polygamy, the older men come in and snap up these young, well, these girls, basically, quite often. So you were talking about this issue, I find this very interesting. There are so many places in urban Africa that I've found where people invent words for how to escape. So in Tanzania years ago, there was this movie by Chuck Norris and it was a POW prisoner of war movie from Vietnam. And at some point they said they all got together and made the plan the night before. And when they did, that's okay, you do this. In the morning, you do this, you do this. And then everybody said, these are all these American soldiers. And they said, yayo. And so the new word from the movie to escape was 20 to yaya, kuyeya. So when they see the police come, kuyeya was the way to say let's escape. So it's, I've heard this many places, to escape from who? From the police, from security, whatever, whatever. Because what you're doing is illegal, you're not supposed to be together, you're not supposed to do this, female youths, whatever. There's always a problem. And you mentioned policy and I urge everyone to keep in mind policies don't matter, it's implemented policies. There are a lot of policies that just sit there. And so that is a way, sometimes for governments to say we'll work on that policy. No, they won't. It's a policy that's just, it's a law on the books, nothing happens. Implemented ones. And then practices that aren't, that are implemented that aren't on the books. And that's where we get into the issues of I think the informal sector. The informal sector is a vital place for female youth. There's nowhere else to go. For most male youth, it's also the same. These are enormous. And war economies expand, not contract in many places. And then there are more things for sale, not less things for sale during wars. And so it's important to understand how the dimensions of the informal sector and how there isn't an option in the lives of so many young people. That's all there is. And we have to understand it and how it works. And I think as outsiders to get involved and try to recognize these people. And I think it's a good starting place to think of female youth. Cause they're not, how can you help them if nobody's even aware of their existence? And unfortunately, that often happens. So, my name is Kaleb from Kenya. In one of your works, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if it's this one, talk about going to Congo and to a woman and asking the woman what's your sign. It says Amanda Kishimesh, which means she's going to live the white man's life in town. And looking at what you've talked about in cultural exclusion, look like for example, in Kenya, at one point those culturally accepted, like when you go to the city, it's like that's your manhood. When you go to the city and do whatever work there or just try to make a shilling and go back to the village, then you'd be considered as a man. But now it's changing because more people are coming to the city, it's becoming more common and anybody can do it. So it has raised to people who are traveling outside the country. So my question is, with the rise of social media, people are able to connect from people outside Africa. And for example, in South Sudan where we see youth in diaspora actually fueling the flames of conflict and influencing other youth. My question is, what is the role of the youth in diaspora and how does that affect the youth in Africa who looks at these personas? Okay, this is a man, he's in the U.S. So he's in Europe. And he has education or maybe he doesn't even have a university in Europe, but the fact that he's in the country is considered, you know, that's out of tune. So where does that feed him? How they influence the youth? Wow, what a great question and I'll go quickly. This is a big, big idea. But I think the diaspora, youth in the diaspora, youth who living outside of the country is really a way of saying there isn't much for me here. And so the role models are often in other places because there aren't those role models. And it's kind of a tragedy when this happens because the role model is kind of, it can be unreachable, you know, university degree when you've only been in primary school or something like that. But I think it's an indication of people's aspirations and who they're modeling themselves after. And when you get a situation where people are modeling themselves after people, you know, the idea of a successful youth where, not in my country, outside, which is a way of saying we got a problem here because the role models aren't in this country anymore. And so I think it's a way of recognizing how significant our challenges are through that and also where people want to, where they're pitching themselves. Where do they want to go? The last point I want to make is, again, just to say, I'm really optimistic about making things different because we're having these conversations now. I tell you, 10 years ago in America, before 9-11, there were no youths. There was no real focus on youth in my experience. It was really difficult to have a discussion. It was usually, yes, it's important, but, and then you have all the reasons why you can't do something. And there really now is a recognition, not only that youths were important, but that we have youths giving us ideas and being part of the conversation. And the UN declaration is 2250 is really helping us move in that direction. And I think that's all very exciting. So thanks very much for your time. I wanted to thank Mark for coming here to USIP. We're so fortunate that he's close by. We can tap into his energy and his expertise. And I wanted to thank you both for coming around to that conversation around gender. At the end, we invited Mark here as part of our series of events and our 60-day engagement around the intersections between youth, gender, and peace. And it really is so important for us to figure out how, and to really elevate the voices of those youth who are working for gender equality and really figure out how we can narrow that gap between those who are focusing on youth. So thank you again for being here and thank you for those who are viewing me. Thank you so much.