Youth-led faith inspired and interfaith peacebuilding initiatives in Africa. - Video

This session stems from the desire to share best practices of unique interfaith youth lead peace building interventions that contribute to promoting inclusive approaches to peacebuilding interventions, including the integration of refugees, displaced persons and immigrants.

This approach is motivated by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), particularly on freedom of religion or belief, that provides for the ability to worship in peace and security, as a universal human right. The presenters will highlight their experiences in confronting violations and harmful practices that are often a source of tensions in the communities, depriving people from enjoying and benefiting from peaceful co-existence. These experiences will demonstrate promising interventions in different spheres as follows:

i) Efforts directed at working within religious communities and actors to promote open and tolerant norms and practices, while address harmful narratives and practices.

ii) Efforts directed at working between different religious communities and actors to address common grievances, promote inter-religious dialogue and peaceful coexistence.

iii) Efforts directed at working with faith actors to engage decision makers with a view to promote policies and practices that protect and promote the Freedom of Religion and Belief, women’s rights and the rights of minority groups.

iv) Intentionally working with women and youth as important agents of change through the decision-making structures and processes, both in religious and policy spaces.

Additionally, the session will provide insights into the trends and challenges related to inclusion and protection of refugees, internally displaced people (IDPs), migrants and returnees in their regions in
peace building programming. This is follows a very recent regional consultative process with faith actors in the East and Horn of Africa, Southern Africa and Northern Africa under the banner “Welcoming the Stranger”.

The consultations offered diverse examples of faith-based interventions from the lived experiences and perspectives, best practices, and recommendations faith actors working and living within both host and refugee communities.

The presenters will highlight intricate issues around conflict, identity, mistrust and trauma dynamics, all of which influence migrant experience. But more significantly, the focus will be on sharing success stories of faith actors uniquely positioning themselves to tap into the trust that parties put in them as faith leaders and how they use existing faith networks and religious structures to channel assistance in high levels of mistrust between refugees and host communities. In most cases, religious groups and religious centres are often the referral point for newcomers, where people and other institutions will direct the refugees, displaced persons and immigrants to faith organizations for initial support.

This session provides a space to showcase some of the innovative approaches for responding to these crises with hope for improved collaboration of various actors that guarantees the dignity and well-being of the refugees.