From the 29th September to the 1st October, the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament a and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNLIREC), together with the Office of the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) Programme in Honduras, facilitated three workshops centred on the development of indicators that measure illegal trafficking and disarmament. These activities were undertaken in the framework of the joint programme entitled “Youth Volunteerism for Peacebuilding and Disarmament: Young People Measuring Community Security Through Participatory Indicators,” which has been taking place in Colombia, Honduras, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago since June 2017. The main objective of this initiative is to educate young volunteers on the 2030 Agenda and, specifically, on the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16, security and illegal trafficking, so that they can develop indicators to measure the impact of these phenomena at the community level.
About 80 young volunteers from Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and La Ceiba, leaders of youth organizations engaged in violence prevention and peacebuilding, participated in the three workshops for the development of indicators.
The workshops followed a participatory methodology to ensure that young people’s perspectives guided the debate and the definition of indicators. In this regard, the session began with a presentation of key concepts and definitions through local and national case studies that have been reported by the media in recent years. Among the salient issues for young people were stockpile management, the impact of stray bullets and the need to provide training for and to increase awareness among law enforcement officials, the media and civil society organizations.
The young volunteers developed indicators that concentrated on the information they wanted to measure from a local perspective, incorporating advice given on this process to ensure its validity, as well as a focus on gender and youth. The workshops were a space for creativity and exchange where indicators were proposed. The project’s volunteers would then validate these indicators in the upcoming work sessions.
These young Hondurans not only led these workshops, applying technical information and their previous training geared towards the development of indicators, but also provided a critical analysis of human security, armed violence and the illicit trafficking of firearms, phenomena that affect their age group and community. This is a direct contribution to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.
Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNLIREC)