Project Description

We have called the festival we aspire to organise, "Sangam". With etymological origins in ancient Sanskrit, it is a word that exists in several South Asian languages, such as Bangla (Bengali), Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, and Urdu, with the same connotation - "confluence" or "coming together".  It is a word that truly represents what we aim to achieve. As future generations have more to lose, therefore we bring together youngsters and adolescents, with an emphasis on the shared cultural characteristics of the South Asian region, to introduce the next generation of change agents that will focus on creating common projects, sharing ideas, and engaging with local governments, and thus, be the seeds of peacebuilding while trying to overcome the challenges associated with climate change.  

Developing peace-building dialogues, roadmaps, bridges, and strategies centered around climate change will help nations identify the conciliation benefits, as climate change is already affecting the entire region, with no borders attached. 

Objectives

The objectives of the project are:

• To develop a program and platform to engage youth and allow them to gain capacity and exchange perspective on climate induced conflicts;

• To mobilize capacity and exchange of perspectives, among young people, on climate induced conflicts and urgency of the issue;

• To evaluate the effectiveness of the designed program and platform on young’s capacity building and their motivation to engage in action, dissemination and policy conversations related to climate induced conflicts in South Asia.

Key Questions Addressed by the Project

• How can we design an engaging program and build a platform for young people to mobilize capacity and allow perspective exchange on climate induced conflicts?

• How do young people perceive their experiences (after going through the program) related to their capacity on climate induced conflict and motivation to engage in action and policy conversations to deal with climate change?

• How effective was the program and platform to engage young people?

Key Activities of the Project

• Partner Onboarding - In this project, we plan to implement the Sangam festival using Young Network for Climate Action’s platform, in Nepal. We have already taken them on board to incorporate the Sangam festival in their Yearly conference “National Youth Climate Change Conference” (NYCCC). Now we are working on  developing the communication strategy and an action plan to engage young people in Nepal.

• Youth Selection & Consultations – We select the young participants via competitive process. Furthermore we will conduct a series of consultations to keep the selected participants engaged and collect their ideas on festival’s agenda.

• Preparation of the Festival - Finalising and sharing the agenda for the festival, sending invitations to the speakers, guests, and media from participating country, preparing social media platforms to ensure the festival is broadcast live.

• Sangam Event -  The event will be organized in Nepal for selected young people in Nepal and the outcomes from the event along with the action points will be shared with their counterparts (partner young organizations) in Pakistan and India via virtual event.

• A Broad Outline of the Event: The main components of our multiple day festival include (but not limited to) educational (workshops, training sessions, quizes, debates, etc.) scholarly (lectures, panel discussions, etc.), literary (one to one interviews with eminent literary figures who have written on climate related issues, such as Amitav Ghosh, round tables, etc.), platform to share indigenous wisdom around climate change and cultural elements (dance and music performances, film screenings - both documentaries as well as feature films, etc.) and the event is expected to be 1-2 days long.

Expected Outcome

The project is expected to:

• Design an engaging (and scalable) program and build a platform for young people in Nepal to mobilize capacity and allow perspective exchange on climate induced conflicts.

• Building the capacity of youth in Nepal and other SAARC countries (participants from the other SAARC countries, such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka can be attracted by networking with NGOs in those countries. We have connections with Salzburg Global fellows in each of these countries and we can engage with them on climate induced conflict and motivate them to engage in action and policy conversations to deal with climate change.

Readiness

It is important to note that:

• Under Salzburg Global Seminar’s fellowship, we have developed a local and global team and partnerships to conduct this research effectively;

• We have piloted this project, with a reduced number of participants, under Young General Assembly’s platform and the results were positive. See more on this website: https://ygapakistan.org/confluence-4-peace/

• We have also conducted an exchange event between Young General Assembly and an Indian counterpart, Givfunds, to exchange action points and promote dialogues between two nations;

• Now we want to conduct this project with more participants in Nepal and scale it further and evaluate its effectiveness.

• We have the right networks to disseminate information on the project and results of the project.