Explanation on the Sierrayouth project:
1. The ideas of the project:
- Build a hotel as a joint-venture between European and Sierra Leone executors.
- The hotel could be situated not far from a local small community, not in the middle of the tourist centers but at the other hand easy reachable from the airport.
- Not too much luxury but essential comfort and reliability.
- An integrated project.
- Visitors (individual and group companies) become citizens of the village and after leaving the country stay in contact and keep on supporting the development of the local community.
- Thanks to the program the hotel will become the catalyst of the expansion and the development of the village because many joint-ventures will be started up.
- The hotel will also be a center of training for different activities.
2. Interested companies can identify themselves in a different perspective.
The project is a capacity and community building project that brings together different cultures in an African situation.
Every European small or big company will invest in different activities.
5. The base of the joint-venture will be
- A group of investors starts a partnership in Sierra Leone and gives 50 % minus 1 share to the Sierra Leone partners.
- KENBEL Company buys land and develops.
- From the beginning everything is done with the Sierra Leone architecture, construction, product development, publicity, animation, etc…
- European trainers will be involved.
- There will be training in Europe but also in Sierra Leone and other parts in Africa
- There will be an exchange of participants and executors.
- The profit of the project will be used to develop more community activities and conditions.
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE PROJECT CONTACT petermerckx@bweducconsult.org
The lack of training and employment prospects for young people played an important role in this. Also the ruling and land owning classes - especially at a village level - were found to have failed or to have been unwilling to assist those who were vulnerable and needed help and to integrate them in society. The young people subsequently unleashed their frustrations on society in an extremely violent manner in the form of a gruesome war.
Many millions of dollars have been spent on reintegration projects, mainly in the form of providing vocational training. Yet in a country where the majority of the population earns its income from farming, the many newly-qualified carpenters and tailors could find no work.
The majority of ex-soldiers had to return to their villages. Without access to land or reforms in the local jurisprudence, they remained vulnerable to exploitation by the local ruling elite. Others left for the diamond fields. Yet as they could scarcely sell their skills, they ended up working for subsistence wages in the mines.
Sierra Leone has one of the world’s youngest populations, with youths comprising more than 50% of the country’s population.1 Eleven years of devastating civil war subjected youth in Sierra Leone to different forms of trauma—youth were both the perpetrators and victims of the extreme violence that tore apart the country. This history poses complex challenges for sustained peace and socio-economic development of the country as it moves into a post-conflict peace-building process.
The involvement of youth in the politics of violence in Sierra Leone has its roots in that country’s political past. The mobilisation of youth in politics was a strategic move that targeted the group that was arguably most affected by decades of economic decline and social degradation. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities between the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the government in 1991, Sierra Leone’s youth were already facing prospects of an uncertain future due to a combination of factors.
Years of corruption, a patrimonial economy based in Freetown that benefited the country’s elite, neglect of the country side, collapsed infrastructure, chronic and ever rising unemployment levels, and general collapse of the education system all combined to lead many people to believe that only a violent overthrow of such a corrupt system will improve their lives. The youth, most of them students, were at the forefront of this struggle.2
The involvement of youth in the politics of violence in Sierra Leone raises a number of issues as it does in many societies where children and youth have been involved in conflict. The first issue is that children and youth are used in conflicts in a political way only to be marginalized later and relegated in to an apolitical sphere, especially during and after the peace process. Despite having been hailed as a United Nations (UN) success story, the Sierra Leone case is, like many, a case of lost opportunity to improve the social, economic and political lives of children and youth.
In Sierra Leone little attention was focused on those who joined fighting as children and were discharged as adults. Post-war youth in Sierra Leone need to learn life skills in addition to livelihood skills. Life skills means giving the youth multi-purpose capabilities that will ensure that they become complete citizens with psychological, intellectual and social skills that allows them to survive in society. This will involve political will and a commitment to provide resources for all those concerned. More importantly, such an approach will require working with the donor community to change some of the focus in their funding and realise that Sierra Leone has a challenge of re-orientating its youthful population to new ways of living and behaviour.
The challenge of dealing with youth issues means there is an urgent need to build on government’s recognition that youth are a special group that need attention and resources committed to their cause and concerns. So far there have been few resources committed to the realisation of this goal. Political will on the part of government needs to be backed up by concrete action. The prolonged neglect and lack of governmental commitment might be perceived as the continuation of indifference to the needs of the youth that has characterised previous governments in Sierra Leone. Although it is fair to say that the government does recognise the youth problem, a clear strategy and commitment to address the issue is still being developed.
The peacemaking, peacekeeping and now peace-building mission in Sierra Leone has achieved tremendous successes. The UNAMSIL mission undoubtedly achieved many successes that culminated in Sierra Leone declared disarmed and elections held in a relatively peaceful environment. However, many challenges remain as the country has entered the peace-building phase. Some of these challenges reflect deficiencies of the Sierra Leone peacemaking and peacekeeping phases of the peace process.
With youth comprising more than 50 per cent of Sierra Leone’s population, the neglect of some of the needs of this section of the population will have serious consequences in the sustenance of peace in the country. Although the establishment of the Child Protection Office during the UNAMSIL mission was major step forward there has been neglect of children and youth needs during the Sierra Leone peace process.
It has been argued here that although children have some form of legal protection through international human rights law, there has been a failure to adequately implement this protection. The situation is worse when the issue of youth is considered. Youth form part of a grey definitional and legal area that consequently results in them not being adequately protected during all phases of the peace process.
During the DDR process the assumption is that focus should be on providing humanitarian support to ex-child soldiers and only material support to youth ex-combatants (the same provided to adults). This overlooks the fact that most of those who get demobilised as youth were recruited as children and suffered years of abuse and thus have unique needs. They are simply provided with vocational training without any direct form of further support, such as psychological consultation. Depression and feelings of neglect by society are increasing amongst the youth in Sierra Leone as they find themselves shunned by society and not provided with opportunities to earn a living by the government. This situation is a serious potential threat to the sustainability of Sierra Leone’s fragile peace and needs to be addressed urgently.
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