AUN-API receives international award for peace work

By correspondant

A Nigerian local community programme that prevents conflicts between Christians and Muslims, and uses sports to prevent young people from joining terrorist groups, has won the annual prize for Inter-religious peace-building from the London-based international Peace Direct organisation.
The winners were announced at a ceremony in London and Washington, DC on Friday, December 9, 2016.
A statement by the AUN Director of Communications, Daniel Okereke, said The American University of Nigeria-led Adamawa Peacemakers Initiative (AUN-API) was one of three winners out of 244 entrants from 61 countries.
The Tomorrow’s Peace Builders Award includes a $10,000 grant to be used to further the recipients’ peace work. The AUN-API award is recognition for success working against conditions that created Boko Haram
“We are deeply honored by this recognition,” said Dr. Margee Ensign, president of the American University of Nigeria, which created API and provides overall direction.
“We’re grateful to all members of API, our interfaith clergy and other leaders of API, but especially Abdulahi Bello, who coordinates our Peace Through Sports program.”
One innovative aspect of the programme is the Peace Through Sports, where young men and women join teams to play soccer, basketball and volleyball.
Ensign said: “The teams are unity teams-with Christian and Muslim young people playing together.  They learn to respect and to cooperate with one another, to appreciate and value beliefs different than their own. Numerous participants told me that ‘It was either Boko Haram or you.’”

In addition to the Peace Through Sports programme, AUN-API conducts mediation sessions in communities, teaches conflict resolution techniques, provides literacy instruction for out of school children, and feeds thousands of people displaced by violence.
Ensign, who also chairs API, said “the AUN-API’s approach is scalable and replicable, and the key elements, which rely heavily on local knowledge and expertise, have already been replicated elsewhere, especially in places that are hard for government authorities and humanitarian organizations to reach.  Another advantage is that the community expertise at the heart of AUN-API is sustainable and can evolve in response to challenges inside and outside the community.”
The longer-term vision, according to her, is to spread the model throughout the wider region and country, wherever there is conflict, at-risk youth and the need for local empowerment.