Transforming Youths - Leading Change for Peace in Colombia:

"Transforming Youths - Leading Change for Peace" in Colombia: The project focuses on promoting the meaningful and active participation of young people in decision-making processes that facilitate intergenerational dialogues and contribute to territorial peacebuilding platforms. To achieve the latter, the project is based on institutional and community capacity-building directed towards local entities and actors, as well as youth organizations in the two prioritized territories: Buenaventura and Santander de Quilichao. This project has four outputs: 1) Strengthening of youth capacities, 2) Institutional strengthening, 3) Consolidation of the regional youth alliance and 4) Implementation of youth social innovation initiatives.

50 organizations in Buenaventura and 30 in Santander de Quilichao have been selected to participate in this project through a mapping exercise. In July 2022, young participants attended a capacity building workshop where project management, innovation and gender-based violence were identified as priority issues and a toolkit was developed.
 
At the same time, 39 participants, from mayor's offices and municipal youth councils, benefited from another capacity building training, where they discussed tools for updating the Youth Public Policy; the Youth, Peace and Security Agenda of the UN; self-care and self-protection strategies to mitigate and prevent human rights violations; the Youth Citizenship Charter, National Youth System and Sustainable Development Goals. As a result of this workshop, two contextualized toolkits were developed for each municipality, focusing on the themes and solutions discussed.
 
In relation to the implementation of youth initiatives, 26 organizations (15 in Buenaventura and 11 in Santander de Quilichao) were selected through a public call to work on the YPS Agenda on peacebuilding issues, risk prevention and protection and gender equality. Some of these youth initiatives were implemented in November 2002, and other will follow throughout January 2023. Topics covered by these winning initiatives range from the promotion of sexual reproductive rights to initiatives that seek reconciliation and youth participation through art and ancestral knowledge. Other topics include training in new leaderships and political participation for young people with an emphasis on gender issues, risk assessment, self-protection and prevention measures.
 
The establishment of a youth alliance strategy from the prioritized municipalities is high on the agenda. This alliance will have two components: an interactive one through a digital platform, where users can learn about the work of other organizations, and another one based on the creation of an inter-municipal alliance, generating meeting spaces for the construction of a collective agenda between young representatives of Buenaventura and Santander de Quilichao. Next steps will also include the implementation of youth initiatives and the organization of a fair to bring together young participants from the two prioritized territories and publicize their actions to other cooperation agencies, the private sector and institutions national and territorial public.