What happens when young people are not simply invited to peacebuilding activities, but are equipped, trusted, connected and resourced to lead change themselves?
The experience of the Kolhat Barray Inclusive Peace and Reconciliation Project in Sierra Leone offers important answers.
Implemented through a partnership between the Youth Partnership for Peace and Development (YPPD) and Cordaid, the project sought to create an enabling environment for young women and men, working intergenerationally, to practice active citizenship and collectively influence conflict-prevention practices at community and national levels.
An Outcome Harvesting process undertaken around the project went beyond asking whether planned activities had been completed. Instead, it examined what had actually changed—and how the project contributed to those changes.
The findings provide encouraging evidence for YPPD, but they also offer important lessons for donors, development partners and peacebuilding organizations interested in supporting locally led, youth-driven and sustainable approaches to conflict prevention.
Starting With Young People as Peacebuilders
The Kolhat Barray approach was grounded in a principle at the heart of UNSCR 2250: young people have a positive role to play in building and sustaining peace.
Rather than approaching youth primarily as a risk group or passive beneficiaries, the project equipped young women and men to identify the drivers of conflict, insecurity and injustice within their own communities—and supported them to act.
Under one component of the project, the approach targeted 360 young people, using community-based research, youth profiling and participatory narrative inquiry alongside leadership development.
Training was designed to strengthen personal and organizational leadership, community organizing, conflict analysis and mitigation, advocacy and public communication.
But training alone was not the objective.
The intention was to help young people translate knowledge into agency, relationships and practical action.
The Outcome Harvest demonstrated why this distinction matters.
When Training Becomes Community Action: The Mathonkara Story
One of the clearest examples emerged from Mathonkara in Tonkolili District.
A conflict surrounding mining had escalated between local police and young people whose livelihoods depended heavily on mining. According to the report, mining was the primary livelihood activity in the locality, with the mining company employing a substantial proportion of local youth.
At the same time, mining activities had become an environmental and health concern because of river pollution. Government restrictions on mining, continued mining activity and police enforcement contributed to increasing tensions. The conflict eventually became violent.
Against this difficult background, representatives of the Youth Empowerment and Development Organization (YEDO) facilitated a series of meetings and dialogue sessions between the local police, a mining company, the Office of National Security and the Paramount Chief between October and November 2021.
The process ultimately contributed to the peaceful resolution of the conflict.
What made this outcome particularly significant was that YEDO reported that it was the first time the organization felt confident enough to undertake a mediation process of this scale.
YEDO attributed part of this new confidence and capacity to skills gained through training provided by Cordaid and YPPD, particularly in conflict prevention, peacebuilding and communication. The organization used those skills to gather perspectives from key stakeholders before beginning mediation, strengthening its approach.
Other actors—including the local police, Legal Aid Board and Office of National Security—also contributed to the outcome.
This is an important lesson for development partners.
Capacity strengthening becomes particularly valuable when local organizations can apply what they learn independently to real problems after a training room has emptied.
Changing the Institutions Around Young People
Kolhat Barray did not focus exclusively on building youth capacity.
It also worked with community-based dispute-resolution providers to promote more inclusive, gender-sensitive and conflict-sensitive practices, particularly in responding to the needs of young women.
The project targeted traditional and community-level actors including Paramount Chiefs, sub-chiefs, chiefdom speakers, local court personnel and Customary Law Officers.
Activities included technical guidance and training, youth palavers, small grants for youth-led organizations, and mechanisms through which young people could monitor responsiveness and accountability.
This was important because meaningful youth participation cannot depend only on making young people more capable.
The institutions surrounding them must also become more open, responsive and accountable.
The Outcome Harvest recorded significant positive claims in this area, including an overall reduction in violence in communities, effective referral mechanisms involving local police and community stakeholders, reductions in gender-based violence cases, safer communities, and substantial changes in the inclusion of women and youth in community-based dispute-resolution mechanisms.
The report appropriately recognizes that multiple actors can contribute to social change. Yet key informants strongly supported the contribution of Cordaid and YPPD, with the Kolhat Barray Project identified in many cases as a significant or sole contributor to harvested outcomes.
Connecting Generations Instead of Creating Parallel Systems
Another important lesson concerned relationships between younger and more established civil society organizations.
One challenge identified by the project was poor networking between older and younger CSOs.
Kolhat Barray deliberately worked to change that.
In 2021, older and younger civil society organizations across Pujehun, Tonkolili and Western Area Rural Districts strengthened their networking and engagement. This increased opportunities for younger organizations to participate in district coordination and project implementation.
RACAP, an established CSO in Pujehun, described the change as particularly significant because it was the first time in more than ten years of its operations that younger and older CSOs had collaborated in this way.
For younger organizations, these relationships created pathways into district coordination meetings and civil society platforms while improving community access and opportunities for collaborative intervention.
The experience of Unique Ladies, a younger women-led organization from Tonkolili, illustrates this effect. The organization reported that its participation helped it build relationships with older CSOs while strengthening its capacity to implement activities in communities where it had not previously worked.
For donors and partners, there is an important principle here:
Localization is not only about transferring resources. It is also about strengthening relationships, legitimacy, networks and access to decision-making spaces.
Organizational Development Is Part of Peacebuilding
Some of the project's most sustainable outcomes may appear administrative at first glance.
In 2021, youth-led organizations from Pujehun, Tonkolili and Western Area Rural Districts obtained formal legal status through registration with local councils and relevant Ministries, Departments and Agencies.
Registration enabled organizations to meet eligibility requirements for the Kolhat Barray small-grants programme.
But its value extended beyond one project.
Formalization increased the legitimacy of these youth-led organizations within their communities and potentially opened opportunities to seek support from other donors.
This matters because sustainable peacebuilding requires sustainable local institutions.
If grassroots organizations are expected to lead community-level change but lack basic organizational systems, legal status, funding eligibility, networks or institutional credibility, their ability to sustain that work will remain constrained.
Investing in organizational development should therefore not be regarded as an administrative side activity.
It is an investment in the infrastructure that makes locally led peacebuilding possible.
Small Grants Can Turn Capacity Into Action
The project combined capacity strengthening with opportunities for youth-led CSOs and CBOs to access small grants. That combination is particularly important.
Training can build knowledge. Networking can create relationships. Organizational development can strengthen legitimacy. But local actors also require resources to put their ideas into practice.
Kolhat Barray therefore connected capacity strengthening with locally led action while creating opportunities for youth organizations to influence conflict-prevention practice.
For future programming, this reinforces the importance of designing youth empowerment initiatives as an ecosystem rather than a series of disconnected activities.
Train young leaders. Strengthen their organizations. Connect them to institutions. Create intergenerational relationships. Provide resources. Give them space to lead. Then invest in learning from what changes.
Women’s Inclusion Was Not a Side Issue
Gender inclusion was deliberately embedded within the project's approach.
Young women were placed at the centre of interventions where their needs were considered particularly acute. The project also sought to strengthen women's participation and leadership while working through mixed groups and engaging male allies.
The Outcome Harvest found that many newly identified outcomes related to gender inclusion and transformation.
Among the significant changes reported were improvements in the inclusion of women and youth within community-based dispute-resolution mechanisms.
This reinforces a crucial lesson for future peacebuilding investments: gender inclusion works best when it is built into project design, relationships, accountability mechanisms and community institutions from the beginning rather than added as a separate activity.
What Outcome Harvesting Taught Us
The Outcome Harvesting exercise itself produced valuable learning. Initial assessments suggested that Kolhat Barray was performing well across its major objectives. Key informant interviews helped cross-validate existing outcomes while also identifying changes that had not necessarily been anticipated or fully captured through conventional monitoring.
Importantly, the process found very little negative feedback or unintended negative outcomes, although those identified were recognized as requiring follow-up and mitigation.
Many outcomes were considered significant because they showed potential for sustainability, represented changes occurring for the first time, or reflected more systemic shifts.
Key informants particularly valued the project's participatory approaches, including:
- kick-off meetings and baseline assessments;
- community-based dispute-resolution needs assessments;
- youth profiling;
- training for dispute-resolution providers;
- co-creation workshops;
- youth leadership training; and
- story collection.
Participants did more than appreciate these activities. According to the Outcome Harvest, many subsequently took action and cascaded their learning through their communities and networks.
That is an important measure of sustainability.
A project's influence becomes more durable when knowledge, relationships and practices continue to travel beyond the people directly reached.
Four Lessons for Future Donor Investment
The Kolhat Barray experience suggests several principles that can strengthen future partnerships with YPPD and other locally rooted organizations.
- First, fund youth as actors, not simply beneficiaries. Young people already possess knowledge of community dynamics and can play substantive roles in mediation, early action, advocacy and conflict prevention when provided with appropriate skills, resources and institutional access.
- Second, combine capacity with resources and opportunity. Training is strongest when participants have opportunities to apply their learning through grants, advocacy, mediation, community dialogue and organizational leadership.
- Third, invest in the ecosystem around young peacebuilders. Sustainable youth leadership requires responsive traditional authorities, government institutions, security actors, civil society networks and intergenerational partnerships. Strengthening young people without addressing these surrounding relationships limits what they can achieve.
- Fourth, invest in learning—not just reporting. Outcome Harvesting helped identify changes beyond activity counts, including unexpected outcomes, changes in relationships and indications of institutional transformation. Future investments can benefit from learning approaches that continuously ask not only what did we deliver? but what changed, why did it change, and what should we do differently next time?
Building the Next Generation of Locally Led Peacebuilding
Kolhat Barray also surfaced challenges that remain relevant for future programming: limited personal leadership capacity among some youth leaders, inadequate funding for youth-led advocacy, difficulties identifying and mapping youth- and women-led organizations, and weak networking between older and younger civil society actors.
These are not reasons to reduce investment.
They are signals about where future investment can have greater impact.
YPPD's experience demonstrates the value of an approach rooted in local knowledge, participatory design, youth leadership, intergenerational collaboration and community ownership.
The project's outcomes also point toward opportunities for the next generation of partnerships: expanding youth-led conflict prevention into more communities; strengthening women-led peacebuilding; supporting grassroots organizations to become institutionally sustainable; investing in locally led research and learning; deepening relationships between youth and community dispute-resolution mechanisms; and providing flexible resources that allow young organizations to respond to emerging conflict risks.
An Invitation to Build on What Works
For YPPD, the Kolhat Barray experience is not simply a story about a completed project.
It is an evidence base from which to build.
It demonstrates that when young people and grassroots organizations receive the right combination of skills, trust, institutional access, partnerships and resources, they can move from participating in peacebuilding to actively shaping it.
For donors and development partners seeking sustainable approaches in Sierra Leone, the lesson is equally important: some of the most meaningful changes begin with local actors who already understand the conflicts, relationships and opportunities within their communities.
The next opportunity is to take what has been learned and go further.
YPPD welcomes partnerships that can scale locally led conflict prevention, deepen youth and women's leadership, strengthen grassroots institutions, generate evidence and create sustainable pathways between communities and decision-makers.
Because investing in young peacebuilders is not simply investing in a project.
It is investing in the people, organizations and relationships that will sustain peace long after a project ends.