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Somalia

Youth power is the best defense

*by Dr. Luay Shabaneh

As I was watching a girls-only basketball game in Garowe, my phone beeped with a message: a double car bomb had taken place in Mogadishu. The message was from a reputed news agency, so there was no reason to question its veracity.

Al-Shabab means The Youth in Arabic, a term that should carry energy, hope and dreams for the future for young men and women. In Somalia though, it has come to mean a group of young radical men that have vowed to battle the UN-backed government. The group emerged after the Union of Islamic Courts, which controlled large parts of Somalia in 2006, was forced out by international forces. Al-Shabab regularly attacks government and UN facilities and personnel, and incites against them in social media, in its attempt to impose a strict version of Sharia.

It was very difficult for me to imagine that, not too far from this very place where I and many others watched adolescents play a friendly match, a group of people maybe their age or a little bit older designed, planned and executed an attack that cost lives. A few days earlier, a colleague from another humanitarian agency was kidnapped by unknown armed people.

In the development and humanitarian worlds, we often talk about empowering young people, by which we mean helping young people exercise their rights to education, to health, to finding adequate jobs and to being responsible citizens in countries that takes their views into account when adopting policies. In reality, young men and women can make or break the future of a country, depending on how valued and empowered they feel.

One straight-forward definition of “youth empowerment” is to encourage young people to take charge of their lives and change their beliefs or attitudes towards what is slowing down their progress. For UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, one cornerstone of empowering youth is to make sure that young girls and boys live a life that is free of violence and discrimination. The game I was watching, for example, was part of a long programme that girls and boys participate in and that introduces several human rights concepts to them, including their right to have a healthy life and to make informed choices about the number and spacing of pregnancies they wish to have in the future.

For girls, the programme also has a full component on the adverse effects of female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage, which are major human rights violations and abhorrent intrusions into the bodies and minds of young women, leaving them with scars that are difficult to heal as well as dangerous complications during pregnancy and child birth. Most of the young girls who enroll in these basketball trainings take up the cause of eliminating FGM and child marriage and soon start to campaign against these harmful practices. Somalia’s prolonged civil war and the emergence of militant armed groups such as Al-Shabab have prevented many girls from playing sports under the claim that sports do not allow for modesty. During the match I watched, the excitement and happiness were palpable, but, more importantly, the way the players cheered and encouraged each other meant they had truly become a team, and a nucleus for a community that will work on promoting youth empowerment themselves.

To think that a society can develop when women and girls cannot fully embrace life due to restrictions on their physical activity is foolish, to say the least. And while fully respecting the cultural and social norms that govern any society, it is now time to acknowledge that there is a baseline below which societies will not advance. That baseline heavily rests on allowing young girls to live healthy lives and be active agents in their communities, just like boys.

It is only when young men and women feel they are useful, respected and engaged in their communities that they can put aside preconceived ideas and work on improving their lives. It is when they understand the importance of physical integrity and the uselessness of some harmful practices that we will start to see real change. It is that change that will curb the violence and reign in those who feel entitled to disrupting other people’s lives.

It is no secret that youth is power, and that such power should be an asset rather than a curse. The more young people feel they are part of change, the less likely they are to disrupting it.

*Luay Shabaneh is UNFPA”s director for the Arab region