The Youth and Social cohesion project is a part of the bigger project of Youth Empowerment undertaken by the United Nations Development Programmes. This project was initiated in 2015, the main objective of the project was to empower and facilitate the youth in conflict-prone areas like Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as well as to strengthen social cohesion. There was a rising issue of the youth resorting to armed violence which was assumed to be due to growing up in a conflict-prone area, hence in collaboration with the Government of Pakistan, the UN aimed to improve the response to these drivers and provide support to help the youth identify better alternative increasing the social cohesion of the area. The approach was to establish community centres to facilitate the people, this also included women and disabled people, working closely with the locals having mobilization efforts and community centres, the youth could learn alternatives to armed violence. Another way in which they were aiming to help the youth, women and disabled community was to also encourage entrepreneurship amongst them. |
As someone with technical knowledge of project management and as a young person I have a vested interest in the success of this project. Overall as the project focuses on encouraging social cohesion and peace in conflict-prone areas as well as helping vulnerable communities these are both causes that I would like to continue forward.
This project is a temporary project ending in 2023 and it is unique in the area it is working on. It is progressive and is encouraging economic and cultural recovery improving the lives of the people living there. As mentioned above the project was initiated in 2015 and was a joint partnership of the UN as well as the Government of Pakistan. The project was started on January 1st 2015 and the completion date was around January 31st 2023. As the completion date is fast approaching we can have a good idea of what work they have done so far and the impact that the project has had. The overall Youth Empowerment Programme received plenty of donations, not only from large companies like Telenor in Pakistan but also from countries like Japan and Norway. The overall expenditure for the project for the year 2021 was $2.27 million, which includes the cost of running the community centre as well as the resources required there.
Moving onto the outcomes of the project, the indicators they had set for themselves included; measuring how well the government was able to understand the drivers behind the violence in the youth, the effectiveness of the intervention methods adopted as well as the engagement of the participants. Within the year 2018, they were able to progress by providing grants and having multiple dialogues with the community. Next in 2019 they exceeded their target, they were able to increase understanding regarding the drivers of violence among the youth with over 3000 participants, and they were also able to get more engagement with surveys and dialogues. Then in 2020 in the start they were behind engagement especially due to lockdown restrictions, however, with the help of additional donations they were able to increase engagement and exceed the target, they increased the youth mentoring and job training as well as career counselling they provided for the youth.
Asma Maqbul,
Lahore.