How do we facilitate access to literacy in remote places of a young country like South Sudan? Such is the complex equation that UNESCO Special Envoy for Peace and Reconciliation Forest Whitaker seeks to solve with the program he conducts there since 2013 through his foundation, the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative (WPDI), the Youth Peacemaker Network (YPN), in partnership with UNESCO, Ericsson and Zain.
The gist of the program is to provide a cadre of young leaders with a unique set of resources to empower them as propagators of peace and development in their communities. Those resources are multiple; they include trainings in peace education and conflict resolution, life skills and entrepreneurship; another key resource is access to information. The participants are equipped with mobile technology and they can use computer centers established to help them access online education material. But those computer centers are not solely intended for the participants of the program: they are community centers for access to knowledge and information. As part of the project, UNESCO joins forces with WPDI to provide trainings in literacy to the community members. This aspect of UNESCO’s and WPDI’s partnership is an important dimension of the YPN as its components are designed to create ripple effects benefitting whole communities.
One such UNESCO literacy program was launched on 27 April, in the presence of Forest Whitaker on the occasion of his mission to South Sudan. In the computer center inaugurated in Torit, literacy courses will be available, as well as educational materials and readings, some of them provided by UNESCO. Adding this literacy program is a significant step in the implementation process of the YPN, which is reaching a maturity point after months of build-up. As the computer center begins to reach its full potential, the young people trained by WPDI have also graduated from an intense training program which has prepared them to train other youth from local communities, where they will lead projects fostering lasting and sustainable development. Throughout the development of their projects, the youth will receive assistance and backstopping from WPDI and its partners, including UNESCO. Finally, those young people will also be mobilized to help WPDI empower youth from other states of South Sudan as the YPN expands across the country, thus forming a greater network for the promotion of peace and reconciliation.