Overcoming youth exposure to violence: Managing and applying knowledge for safe and inclusive societies in Africa

This project supports the project cohort “Understanding and overcoming youth exposure to violence, exclusion, and injustice in Africa”. The project seeks solutions in the form of strategies, technologies, and tools to develop more effective policies for combating the violence, exclusion, and injustice faced by youth, men, and women in Africa.
The project will be implemented under the direction of the Faculty of Environmental Design and the School of Criminology at the Université de Montréal. The main component of the project involves developing a platform for knowledge management and the strategic involvement of researchers with various stakeholders at different levels. The goal is to generate large-scale use of the cohort's results. Using a collaborative, participatory approach focused on cooperation between all members of the cohort, researchers will work to synthesize and organize project results and disseminate them in several forms and channels, giving priority to stakeholders and institutions at the global level.

Moreover, this project has an action research component that will be implemented in insecure neighbourhoods of Dakar, Senegal. It focuses on developing an innovative approach for participatory local governance of urban safety, and on testing its effectiveness in reducing juvenile violence and in improving security and reducing feelings of insecurity among men, women, and children in these communities. The team will seek to establish conditions for replicating this approach in other communities.