In support of peace-building in South Sudan, the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative (WPDI), the foundation established by Forest Whitaker, the UNESCO Special Envoy for Peace and Reconciliation, has inaugurated a sports center in the Protection of Civilians camp managed by the United Nations in Juba and a computer center in Torit.
For close to a year now, South Sudan has suffered from a near civil war that has espoused the lines of ethnic divides. More than 10 000 people have been killed and 1.5 million displaced internally and abroad. The scars will take time to heal. To create conditions for lasting peace in South Sudan, WPDI has started to work at the field level, reaching out to communities notably through youth program that empower them as leaders for peace and development. More than infrastructure, the sports center and the computer center are parts of an encompassing project to support long-term efforts at reconciliation – starting today.
The sports center has been established in partnership with UNESCO and with the support of One World Futbol as part of a program to provide camp residents, especially young people, with opportunities for leisure as well as participatory group discussions and public events. The aim of the project is to mobilize sports as a means to disseminate a culture of peace and non-violence within the IDP camps and, beyond, to the communities affected by conflict.
The computer center established in the town of Torit in partnership with Ericsson, Zain and UNESCO pursues similar objectives in seeking to help open up local communities not only to their national context but also to the world at large. The computer center is originally created to support the activities of the Youth Peacemaker Network, a project designed to train young women and men from the State of Eastern Equatoria in transformative peace-building, mediation and ICTs, so that they can become active engineers of peace and development in local communities of their country. But the center will be available also to all the surrounding communities so that people can benefit from access to information relevant for their lives. In a country where transport and telecommunications remain critically underdeveloped, such a computer center can prove to be a key local asset for the empowerment of citizens as well as the cultural, social and economic development of their communities.
In addition, the computer center will double as a literacy center accessible to the people of the Torit region. Established in partnership with UNESCO, the center aims to increase access to literacy in a country where only 27 percent of those aged 15 and above are said to be literate.
These two inaugurations are initial steps in a strategy to harness education and communication as tools for young people and local communities to appropriate the conditions of peace and development locally aiming at positive ripple effects at all levels.