Youth Theater for Peace: Community Mobilization Through Youth and Performance Art

Youth Theater for Peace—Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan

http://www.irex.org/news/youth-transformed-final-evaluation-youth-theater-peace-released.

USAID’s Youth Theater for Peace (YTP) program in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, implemented by IREX, works at the local level to enable young people to engage their communities in resolving local issues and building peace through a methodology called Drama for Conflict Transformation.  Through YTP, youth write and perform short plays about community conflict issues; during the play, the youth engage with the audience, taking suggestions from audience members about how to resolve the conflict.  After the performances, the dialogue continues as youth facilitate discussion about the play, intentionally engaging community members from diverse cultural groups.  Through this method, the program reached 25 adults and 100 youth as primary beneficiaries in each country, but reached approximately 10,000 community members through performances.  Recently IREX released a final evaluation by an external evaluator using comparison groups and mixed methodology to assess the impact YTP has had on youth and their communities.  The evaluation especially focuses on the effect Drama for Conflict Transformation can have on fostering positive interactions with people of different nationalities and mitigate conflict in multi-ethnic settings.