Where Unemployment Meets Conflict
A panel discussion framed explicitly around the link between youth unemployment and conflict, organized by EDI with the Life & Peace Institute, supported by SIDA. Around 100 young people attended a program that mixed presentations and discussion with youth innovation showcases and entrepreneurial success stories, closing with a certificate handover for participants.
Elders, Religious Leaders, and Students in the Same Room
Two related workshops brought together university students, high schoolers, elders, and religious leaders: a deliberately cross-generational, cross-institutional approach to peacebuilding dialogue. One of the two, organized by Dr. Fikadu on December 7–8, drew about 100 participants (95 men, 5 women) through presentations, discussion, and interactive exercises on conflict causes, peacebuilding strategies, and the roles religious leaders, elders, and students each play in reconciliation, with an emphasis on dialogue, truth-telling, and leading by example.
Life Skills for Street Youth
A different funder, worth noting: this training for street youth on life skills, communication, and community connection was supported by USAID rather than SIDA. The program's capacity-building work draws on more than one partner. It falls outside the SIDA/LPI-funded PAR project, so no additional detail applies here.
Enhancing Skills and Capacity of School Peace Clubs
Under the same PAR project, a dedicated two-day session began building capacity specifically inside school peace clubs: "Enhancing Skills and Capacities of Student Peace Clubs for a Peaceful School Environment and Community," held November 7–8, 2025 at the East Star Hotel in Dire Dawa. Thirteen high schools sent a total of 27 participants (20 student peace-club members and 7 teacher mentors) for training delivered by Taye Endashaw Gebrewold of TAMBA Training, Consultancy and Research Work PLC, covering conflict mapping and root-cause analysis, active listening and nonviolent communication, peer mediation models, and de-escalation.
Students in the Room
The same two-day training, continued: students in uniform sat at the tables and stood in dialogue circles alongside adult facilitators, in the same room as Chapter IV. Each school left with a three-month peace-club action plan and a functioning peer-mediation model, and the schools stayed connected afterward through a shared Telegram network. The first result was a School Peace Club Forum at Sabian Secondary School on December 12, 2025, where the clubs compared notes for the first time.
A Second Training, Seven Months Later
A second two-day training for school peace club leaders and teacher mentors followed at the same East Star Hotel: "Capacity-Strengthening Training for School Peace Club Leaders and Teacher Mentors in Promoting Peace and Managing Conflicts within Schools," held June 4–5, 2026 under the same PAR program, with Sweden, the Life & Peace Institute, and EDI named together on the closing banner.
The format echoes the November 2025 session: an opening icebreaker circle, lecture blocks (one slide names "Day One, Session 3: Roles & Responsibilities of Peace Clubs and Peace Club Leaders"), small-group table work, and a team-building exercise, closing with a four-part self-assessment on a flipchart, activities the clubs do well, activities they struggle with, roles that are clear, and roles that are confused, and a group photo of around thirty students and adults holding the full banner. No attendance figure is confirmed for this session the way Chapter IV's is.
A note on this draft
Chapters I–III are 2024 context (different audiences, in one case a different funder). Correction to this draft: Chapters IV and V were previously published as a "one year on" progression, with Chapter V dated June 4–5, 2026. On review, every one of the source folder's 194 photographs and 9 videos, including the uniformed students used to justify Chapter V, is timestamped November 7–8, 2025, and nothing in the folder supports a 2026 date. Both chapters are now presented as two parts of the same two-day November 2025 training. A genuine 2026 return visit has since turned up in the archive and is now told as Chapter VI, so the "one year on" framing this draft once guessed at turned out to be true, just a chapter later than first assumed.
Chapter I's date, venue, and participant/certificate detail; Chapter II's organizer and attendance figures for the December 7–8 workshop; and Chapter IV/V's school count, trainer, curriculum, and the December 12, 2025 follow-on forum are all treated as confirmed detail. Chapter III (USAID-funded) sits outside the SIDA/LPI PAR project, so none of that additional detail applies to it. Chapter VI's date, venue, and program name are confirmed by its own closing banner; no attendance figure or trainer name is confirmed for it the way Chapter IV's is, so none is stated.
Still missing: individual participant/student names and first-person testimony for every chapter. No specific attendees are named for these sessions. Add before external distribution if that detail becomes available.
EDI · Draft photo story · Not for external distribution