Through youth-created human rights public awareness campaigns, participating students reached at least 6,000 young people through local schools, community groups, and other gatherings. By word of mouth, these presentations easily reached double that total. 12,000 is conservative as some of the students took the initiative to go repeatedly on national radio with their message, thus potentially reaching millions more.

In this third annual round of competitions in our more established English-speaking countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana, the nine teams (three coalition teams per country, 15 persons per team) selected timely human rights issues for their projects:

• Liberia, Team A: corruption (government and business)
• Liberia, Team B: armed robbery
• Liberia, Team C, child trafficking

• Sierra Leone, Team A: youth violence
• Sierra Leone, Team B: access to justice
• Sierra Leone, Team C: government corruption (in procurement of goods and services)

• Ghana, Team A: government corruption
• Ghana, Team B: student violence
• Ghana, Team C: access to justice

These teams conducted their field research and community delivery between mid-April and mid-July, 2008. Again, the participants substantially exceeded the overall production targets, reaching 78 schools and youth groups (72 minimum target), forming 78 human rights clubs formed (63 minimum target), and  6,209 people through team human rights workshops (2,160 minimum target).

British Council, Freetown, 7 August 2009

We wrapped the 2009 project in these three countries in late-July and into August. Again, in each capital city, the teams finalized executive summaries on their issues, rehearsed and then presented those issues in standing room-only events open to the spectrum of the community. The events were:

• Wednesday, 29 July 2009, Samuel K. Doe Stadium, Monrovia, Liberia
• Friday, 7 August 2009, British Council, Freetown, Sierra Leone
• Wednesday, 19 August 2009, British Council, Accra, Ghana

British Council, Freetown, 7 August 2009

Each event featured key note speakers from government and policy making, wide-ranging press coverage (including TV, radio, and print/on-line media), and, most importantly, the impinging presentations of high school- and college-level students on human rights issues that demonstrated to the public and the young people themselves the competence and responsibility of the upcoming generation to make human rights a reality in their communities and nations.  Estimating the many media reports reached even 25% of the populace nationwide over these countries, some 7,000,000 individuals received word of our campaign in 2009.

Hon. Joseph Boakai, Vice President of Liberia

The 2009 competitions in these three nations produced the nine student-made documentary films, the three-per-country premiered at the concluding events in Monrovia, Freetown and Accra respectively.  If promoted and distributed adequately, some of these B Sierra Leone Team A’s video on youth violence stands out B could significantly affect for the better the outlook and determination of youth nationally

Ghana Team A, Government Corruption

From multiple requests we fielded from students on the program about needed scholarships to fund their education, we implemented this year a $100 per-participant financial aid program for the 130 students from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana. It was and is a huge hit, not only with the young people and their parents, but with the government officials and opinion leaders already outspokenly supporting the program.

Ghana Team B, Access to Justice

In Togo, our first French-speaking nation, we completed an initial round of human rights training and activation with some 70 college- and high school-level students that sets the foundation for a full-fledged competition format in coming years.  We conducted a standing room-only concluding event for the young participants here as well, with top speakers and extensive press coverage, TV, radio and print. That coverage probably reached an estimated 1,600,000 people, 25% of Togo’s population.

Chamber of Commerce, Lome', Togo, 21 August 2009

In Addis Ababa, considered the capital of Africa as it is the headquarters of the African Union, we have not only established strong ties with key executives of the AU’s democracy and human rights section but have also created partnership with the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC).  Here too, we conducted a full-house forum on human rights and human rights education, in conjunction with the EHRC, that attracted wide press coverage, including nationwide TV (even 10% of the country is an estimated 8,300,000 persons).

Ghion Hotel, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 26 August 2009

Tim Bowles

Pasadena, California, USA

June, 2010

Rather than pit school against school in each country (a format that had led to unfounded accusations of favoritism by losing schools in 2007), we divided the 30 participating students in Accra, Monrovia and Freetown respectively into two 15 person coalition teams. This enhanced the leadership challenge as each group, made up of spectrum of ambitious and aspiring “chiefs” from different schools and youth groups unfamiliar with each other, had to organize itself into a coordinated whole.

Diana Asima, competitor and speaker, Accra, Ghana, August, 2008

90 high school- and college-age students participated over the three countries. The competition required each team to choose a prevalent human rights abuse in its country or community, research the issue in the field, and to create and deliver an effective public awareness campaign to end that abuse.

Collectively in the three participating countries, the teams targeted reaching a minimum of 1,230 of their peers.  Yet, in the three-to-four months of production, and working as a purely extracurricular activity, these competitors delivered to almost five times that many, some 5,400 of their fellows through 48 other high schools and youth groups.  By this surprising reach and the written testimonials of the thousands touched by the teams’ campaigns, we had struck on a winning pattern of youth community activism, spurred by the format of friendly, even cooperative competition.

From the trial and error of previous years, we structured the 2008 project in three phases:

Phase One, Training, Organization and Planning

The 2008 campaign began with a five week tour through the three countries in March and April, with about ten days in each for the leadership training and organization of the teams, along with concentrated support building with government and civil society leaders.

For the 30 students in each of the capital cities, Monrovia, Freetown and Accra, we conducted a three day series of workshops. Day One was orientation as well as definitions and qualities of leadership. Day Two was project production basics, including purpose, policies and  products, team organization and initial project planning. Day Three was continued project planning and targeting as well as instruction on documentation basics (photo and video). We spent substantial time ensuring that all participants understood his/her task as a team member and competitor, the “valuable final product” of each team on the project:

Production and documentation of  an excellent human rights awareness campaign that is creating youth, government and civil society support for human rights and human rights education

With each member assigned a distinct role in the execution and documentation of their actions on a standardized team organizing board, the teams selected their respective human rights issues and planned the execution of their campaigns.

Liberia, Team A: religious intolerance

Liberia, Team B: rape and other sexual violence

Sierra Leone, Team A: domestic violence against women

Sierra Leone, Team B: right to education

Ghana, Team A: right to education

Ghana, Team B: child trafficking, child labor

Phase Two, Awareness Campaign Research and Delivery:

The teams then competed across a three-plus month research and delivery period between April and July, 2008.  Each team was expected to conduct and document field investigation on their issue, including video interview with community opinion leaders. We also asked each team to deliver as many human rights education presentations to as many high school groups as possible, forming human rights clubs with each.  Teams were to engage schools and youth not only in their respective cities – which tend to be insulated from the rest of the country – but in rural areas as well.

The teams substantially exceeded production targets, with some 53 schools and youth groups reached (42 minimum target); 53 human rights groups formed (30 minimum target); and 5,400 people reached through the team’s human rights workshops (1,260 minimum target).

Student competitors, Monrovia, Liberia

The Ghana teams traveled and investigated their abuse issues in up-country locations. Team A interviewed the local chief and many youth in Kfele, a fishing village, on deprivation of the right to education.  Team B went to Kpando, in the Upper Volta Region, engaging young people in an area notorious for child trafficking.  The teams in Liberia and Sierra Leone made similar outreaches.

Phase Three, Team Reports, Presentations at Concluding Events:

The 2008 campaign concluded with a month-long tour through the three countries from late-July to late-August. During the week-plus in each capital city, the local teams finalized executive summaries on their issues, rehearsed and then presented those issues in standing room-only events open to fellow students, educators, government officials, community leaders and the press. The events:

Friday, 1 August 2008, City Hall, Monrovia, Liberia

Friday, 8 August 2008, British Council, Freetown, Sierra Leone

Friday, 23 August 2008, British Council, Accra, Ghana

That year’s production thus included the six team executive summaries on the respective human rights abuse issues, two project video statements produced by the Ghanaian teams (on the right to education and child labor, respectively), the voluminous team compilations of their field work in all three countries, including reports on their presentations and over 5,000 written success statements from the students reached, “before” and “after” evaluations from the majority of the student competitors, video interviews of the majority of those competitors at the close of the project, and some 30 video interviews with a host of government and community leaders on the value and prospects of the program.

Each of the three concluding events received significant newsprint, radio and television media coverage, with an overall 17M estimated readership, listenership and viewership total between the three countries.

Tim Bowles

Pasadena, California, USA

May, 2010

The African Human Rights Leadership Campaign began in 2006 with the help in particular of young 20-something activists Jay Yarsiah in Liberia and Sammy Jacobs Abbey in Ghana. We started with the notion that Youth for Human Rights International (YHRI) could help young people make a difference in post-conflict zones, and in broader Africa, using human rights education materials that cut across cultural and literacy divides.

Joseph Yarsiah, Monrovia, Liberia human rights education workshop, November, 2006

Those YHRI materials include the Thirty Rights DVD, a series of one minute youth-oriented visual stories, each portraying an article of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 (UDHR). YHRI-published booklets and lesson plans on the UDHR complement the piece.  Inside of a half-hour, that video alone can kick-off an understanding and enthusiasm on the breadth of the Universal Declaration, the first international document defining human dignity and social justice.  Yet, we had no clear path from there to a meaningful educational process for youth in countries with limited resources and very challenging circumstances.

In May, 2006, we dove in with video showings with laptop and a projector to groups of high school and college youth in Ghana and Liberia, sparking discussions on the relevance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to their lives and communities.  A common outcry from students at this stage was that parent and teacher guidance, control and discipline, obviously their prime peace and conflict battleground, were now “human rights violations.”  This was at the very least ironic (and not exactly what we were expecting), particularly in lands still reeling from such recent equal opportunity killing, mass refugee migrations and wholesale destruction, body-and-soul, all ages, backgrounds and genders.

On the last day in Liberia that May (less than three years after the cease-fire but still a time when there was no electrical grid and no running water in the capital, Monrovia), students from three high schools held a “showdown” human rights quiz, like a TV game show but without the cameras and studio audience.  With the room and desks divided into circle-the-wagons territories, leaders from each school sat with their classmates holding a button wired to a central plywood box with a battery-powered buzzer.  The moderator read a question.  The first to buzz got first shot at answering.  Points were scored for correct responses, deducted for incorrect.

The host school got off to a swift start, correctly answering the first question.  On the next one, the hosts buzzed before the moderator finished the sentence and again answered correctly.  Still, the full question could have been anticipated.  On the third, the moderator had said “Name the five … “ when they buzzed again, correctly naming the prime members of the U.N. Security Council. In the drive to compete, our hosts had helped themselves to the questions, sequence and answers in advance.  Once that uproar died down (we give the hosts penalty points and started over, scrambling the questions), the session proceeded as a raucous, good-natured affair. (Fittingly, the host school team placed last.)

High school students, Monrovia, Liberia human rights education workshop, November, 2006

We were back in Monrovia in March, 2007.  By this time, international relief efforts, headed by the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) had dominated the town for three-plus years.  Five military checkpoints continued to mark the airport road alone, citizens still hit the deck at the sound of a car backfiring, and tangible change for the better was difficult to observe.

Over a pizza-fringed planning session one evening (at the Royal Hotel, soldiers and relief workers at the other tables and with ESPN and Yankees vs. Red Sox surreally and hugely projected by generator on the wall above the bar), we observed that high school-going Liberians, while locked into the tedium of rote learning to pass exams, were also skilled at griping over the U.N. occupation, endemic government corruption, continuing human rights abuses, and their own supposed powerlessness to reverse the national inertia.

Monrovian youth, for example, were given to cynical nicknames for the common acronyms around town. “U.N.” actually stood for “United Nothing.”  Elected and appointed officials  had government cars with special license plates.  According to students, the license plate designation for a Senate member, “SEN,” really stood for “Since Election Nothing.” The license plate designation for a House of Representatives member, “REP,” should in truth stand for “Rebel Enjoying Power.”

Thus, it came to us that evening that if competition was such a passion that a group of students would blatantly cheat on a inter-school contest, what about a human rights issue and leadership contest that could strike at student apathy over their seemingly “helpless” situation?

In the student session the next morning, we presented the quickly created basics for the competition. The students perked-up instantly.  Each school was to choose a human rights organization (UNESCO and UNICEF were examples).  By research of that organization’s published materials and interview of its leaders, field workers and intended beneficiaries, the competitors were to evaluate how effectively that agency was fulfilling its human rights mission statement. As appropriate, the team was also to make recommendations to improve that agency’s conflict transformation programs. We would conclude the contest with a final event, with each school vying to present the most thorough and persuasive analysis.  The judges were to be college student leaders, anonymous among the audience.

Monrovia, Liberia human rights education workshop, November, 2006

Thus, in 2007, we set a three month runway for the project, with deadlines for written reports and a scheduled event date.  We repeated the process in Sierra Leone and Ghana.

As rough-edged as it was – including the inevitable cries of foul by the faculty and team members of the losing schools – the Liberian competition’s conclusion in May caught the attention of all major electronic media and top national leadership. (Labor Minister Kofi Woods, Attorney General Johnson-Morris, and the Vice President’s chief of staff Sam Stevquoah spoke.)  We had similar success in Freetown and Accra in May and June, 2007 and were on our way.

Best wishes,

Tim Bowles

The African Human Rights Leadership Campaign, a pilot project of Youth for Human Rights International, is a growing initiative designed to inspire and equip young people to create futures worth living in their communities and countries.

From the Ruins is a short film on this human rights work to date, shot and directed by Ian Jay.

Started in 2006 between young Liberian activist Jay Yarsiah, his Ghanaian counterpart Sammy Jacobs Abbey, and a somewhat wide-eyed American lawyer new to West Africa (me), the Campaign enjoyed its most successful year in 2009.

The training experience is through competitions between teams made up of coalitions of young people from various local senior high schools, colleges and other groups. Each team vies for creation and delivery of the most effective public awareness campaign on a chosen human rights abuse issue. To a person, team members regard any common violation of human rights a matter of their responsibility, not detached observation.

For 2009 — in four African countries: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Togo B some 200 young people now have training and significant experience in the dissemination and implementation of human rights principles in the face of deeply rooted government corruption, common delays and denials of access to justice, and seemingly hopeless cycles of youth violence in their respective countries. Among other results and with the help of local professional editors, the student teams produced nine short documentary films on such African human rights issues.  We also reached for the first time into Ethiopia, where the Campaign received equally enthusiastic response from a broad spectrum of youth human rights advocates and organizations.

We are now planning the Campaign’s coming 18 months of expanding human rights advocacy training, through August, 2011.  This Campaign not only has the makings to help Africa but also the potential to assist in educational innovations that can make global human rights a reality.  Please stay tuned.