Launch of the Regional Youth Engagement and Empowerment Programme in South and Southeast Asia
About the online training course
The hybrid training course combines self-paced reading, live webinars, group exercises, training videos, and ongoing coaching and mentoring from UNCCT Youth Engagement Specialists. Its aim is to prepare the selected youth as leaders to listen to their peers and navigate difficult conversations to extract the challenges and solutions of young people in relation to violent extremism. The YEEP offers a comprehensive online training course that consists of the following modules:
- Welcome and orientation: familiarisation with the programme, peers and the programme team
- Mental health and self-care: participants learn how to take care of their mental health and build a self-care plan
- Violent extremism: participants explore the PCVE subject matter and reflect on their own situations and experiences
- Youth, Peace and Security (YPS): participants explore the role of youth in PCVE and learn about UN Security Council Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security
- Gender and PCVE: the crucial and distinct roles of women and men are explored, as well as how to ensure gender-sensitive activities and programming
- How to apply a coaching mindset: participants learn simple coaching techniques such as active listening, practising open-ended and powerful questions and how to lead a conversation without steering the way
- How to navigate difficult conversations: the young leaders now learn how to deal with different situations that might appear when listening to their peers about sensitive topics such as violent extremism.
- Putting theory into practice: listen to the priorities of your peers: the leaders plan, recruit and implement a series of “listening” sessions with their peers. They will utilise their combined learning to successfully implement this step.
- Transforming priorities into themes: the data collected at the “listening” sessions are now transformed into policy themes that will the basis for concrete policy recommendations to be presented at the policy dialogue
- Preparing for policy dialogue: the young leaders interact with key decision-makers and other stakeholders
Duration of the course: the full course involves a ten-week online course, which aims to culminate in an in-person event (subject to relevant COVID-19 restriction guidelines).
The United Nations Counter-Terrorism Centre (UNCCT) of the United Nations Office on Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) launched, on 5 April 2022, its first-ever regional iteration of the Youth Engagement and Empowerment Programme (YEEP) in South and Southeast Asia, through an online event that gathered 37 youth participants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Maldives.
The Programme
As part of the UNCCT Global Programme on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE), the Regional YEEP focuses on effective youth engagement in South and Southeast Asia by enabling young civil society leaders to rise as empowered changemakers in their own communities, to take ownership of their initiatives, and to eventually become the YEEP’s primary implementing partners.
In a bid to partner ‘with youth’ and ‘for youth’ the UNCCT youth programme aims to empower and enable young people to contribute meaningfully to the United Nation’s global, regional and national efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism and terrorism.
The regional iteration of the YEEP includes three phases:
- capacity building
- peer engagement to capture youth PCVE priorities
- a transformation of these priorities to policy recommendations to be presented to key stakeholders through a concluding Policy Dialogue Event.
Background
In July 2021 the YEEP issued a call for applications for its Youth Engagement and Empowerment Programme to tap into the talent pool of young leaders in South and Southeast Asia promoting effective PCVE youth engagement in the region. The expression of interest received over 700 applications, out of which 37 youth leaders have been selected as the next cohort of young leaders. This includes undergoing hybrid training, coaching and peer engagement, culminating with an in-person policy dialogue event.
In 2020, UNOCT/UNCCT launched the YEEP in line with the recommendations of Security Council resolution 2250 (2015) on Youth, Peace and Security, the United Nations Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, and the United Nations Youth Strategy.
Achievements
Between 2020 and 2021 the YEEP has engaged 635 youth from over 50 countries through peer-to-peer (P2P) workshops, online training, webinars and outreach events.
At the national level, this programme has built the capacity of 35 young leaders in Sudan, Sweden and Australia through its signature Peer-to-Peer (P2P) approach. They implemented 19 P2P workshops, and participated in 3 policy dialogue events, engaging 263 young men and women who collectively identified youth priorities and policy recommendations.
The post-workshop survey (taken by workshops participants in Sudan, Sweden and Australia) were a testament to the successful YEEP pilot phase and its impactful P2P approach with reports of three times more youth feeling listened to and included in PCVE work after attending a P2P workshop. 83% participants felt their contributions were valued by CT/PCVE officials, 99% participants recommended attending the workshop to their peers and 100% YEEP facilitators felt they met their priorities with regard to [preventing? Countering?] violent extremism.
As put by one of YEEP Sudanese Facilitators, “Instead of someone giving them (youth) the information, they get to discuss and discover the information on their own and then frame it together. It was such a good experience that since, we have been doing other workshops in our own work and implemented a lot of the things that we learned”.