LWF Youth Blog

What does youth unemployment has to do with peace building? Youth unemployment is, I suppose, an issue that occurs everywhere in the world, in the North and in the South, the East and the West, in rich countries and in poor countries alike. I personally read about that in my home country’s domestic news and I also hear and see the politicians who promise to make it better after their elections.

But while in Germany youth unemployment is covered by a more or less effective social security net in other parts of the world it might become a matter of life and death.

Actually, youth unemployment was one of the major reasons for a dreadful civil war in Sierra Leone that began in 1991 and lasted until 2002 leaving 50,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands refugees. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Sierra Leone that was installed after the civil war stated that youth “made up the vast majority of the fighting forces”.

But how did it all happen? Shouldn’t the youth be concerned about their country’s future more than everybody else? Of course, this should be the case, and this is actually the case today in many places around the world – but it was different in Sierra Leone before and during the civil war.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated that “the youth in Sierra Leone have been excluded from any meaningful participation in the political process.” It was not just a single incident that happened but a long process of marginalization, so that the TRC said: “The word ‘youth’ itself became a synonym for the unemployed young person who was vulnerable to manipulation.”

If a young person is excluded from the future in such a way it is very easy to convince him to pick up a gun and take what he thinks is his. But many youths actually did not want to fight. They were foreced to. Youth became victims and perpetrators at the same time. They became victims when they were forced to join either the rebel or the national army and they became perpetrators when they engaged in rapes, limb amputations and other horrific human rights violations against civilians. But the line between victim and perpetrators is blurred and youths were even forced to take drugs in order to be able to commit these inhumane acts.

These bad experiences during the civil war were the reason the United Nations took youth unemployment seriously. The Peace Building Commission, which tries to help countries recovering from civil wars, identified youth Unemployment as one of five major topics to address in Sierra Leone. But still, many youths are frustrated. Those who fought in the civil war feel too old to go back to school. For them they did not only lose 10 years of their life, they lost the 10 most crucial years of everybody’s life, the time, coming of age, when young people in other parts of the globe get educated and try to find a job. They are regarded as the lostgeneration of Sierra Leone. Also, many Sierra Leoneans still suffer from their addiction to drugs, they were forced to take during the civil war. Two thirds of Sierra Leone’s 2 Million youth, especially young urban males, are still unemployed or underemployed.

The future of Sierra Leone’s youth depends not only on good education and jobs for everyone but, I assume, also on a positive view about the future. Reconcilation is very didfficult if former perpetrators and victims life together in the same neighborhood, but the churches including the small Evangelical Lutheran church in Sierra Leone (ELCSL) play a very decisive role in providing new hope for the country and it’s youth!