YAD is working tirelessly to foster peace, unity, and socio-cultural cohesion among the youth population in the eastern region. The organization has prioritized psycho-social support programmers, with a special focus on robust sanitization campaigns, capacity-building training, trauma healing, conflict mediation, community dramas, social entrepreneurship, and sporting activities as the major tools required to concretize peace among the youth.
Since the country won independence in the year 1961, its sociopolitical and economic landscape has remained gloomy with dictatorship leadership, civil war, military putsches, electoral fracas, mudslides, epidemic outbreaks, and a jobless youth population that has resorted over the years to excessive alcoholism and drug abuse.
Currently ranked 177 of 187 countries in the global Human Development Index, with 75% of its youth jobless or underemployed due to lack of skill, knowhow, proper education and job opportunities, maintaining the fragile peace and stability in Sierra Leone remains an arduous task that cannot be surmounted without the youth. The civil war left all social infrastructures completely broken, and the youth have been constantly marginalized and deprived of essential social services.
Most youth use commercial bike (Okada) riding as the primary source of income without proper rider training or infinitesimal knowledge of road traffic regulations. Others have chosen drug proliferation, mainly marijuana and kush, as their source of income. Some are ex-combatants who only handed in their weapons after the war in exchange for disarmament packages without going through proper psycho-social rehabilitation, anti-drug and psychotherapeutic programs. As a result, they are addicted to the abuse of harmful drugs and alcohol, which makes them ungovernable in the communities they live.The girls often offer sex for survival, which leads to destroying their future. Many fall out of school as a result of early pregnancy and undesired marriages enforced upon them by the harsh economic situation and harmful cultural, traditional and religious norms.
