News Ghana – 6 August 2021 – By News Ghana
Generations for Peace Ghana has commenced its fourth peacebuilding programme which is aimed at imbibing into children the art of living in harmony and sustaining peace within their immediate environments, in school and in their communities.
The commencement of the implementation process comes after selected delegates were trained in December, 2019 in a new curricular component, Social and Emotional Learning. This new addition will be the focal point for this year’s peacebuilding programme as designed sessions are geared towards participants understanding their emotions in varying situations and contexts.
About two hundred target group members, one hundred females and one hundred males between the ages of 7 to 9 years, of the De Youngsters International School located at Adenta, a suburb in the Greater Accra Region have been selected to benefit from the implementation of the programme. Participants are from different socio-cultural as well as economic backgrounds. The selection was done in 2020 before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic which resulted in halting the eventual implementation of the Socila Emotional Learning Sport and Arts for Peace Programme.
Just like other previous peacebuilding programmes successfully implemented by GFP-Ghana, this year’s programme will use two peacebuilding vehicles, Sport and Arts.
The Implementation Team, which comprises of GFP Pioneers who got trained in Amman, Jordan in October/November 2019, and trained delegates, majority of them being teachers of the host school, shall take participants through twenty well designed sessions. The implementation phase of the programme is to last for a period of about 5 months, which began in July, 2021 and expected to be completed in December, 2021.
The goal at the end of the programme is to witness increased respect among participants, increased tolerance among participants and improved social emotional competence among participants.
GFP – Ghana expects to realize the demonstration of respect among programme participants and other students, demonstration of tolerance between programme participants and friends as well as other students in the school and overall improvement in social emotional competence among friends and other students in the school. The overall goal is to reduce bullying among students in the school.
GFP – Ghana has implemented similar peacebuilding programmes in the past at St. Peters Mission school and University of Ghana, Legon with one of the programmes eventually winning a Samsung Generations For Peace Award for Impact in 2015, in Amman, Jordan.
