Rationale

Election violence has always been a well-known phenomenon to people in our country. Especially those, who are in the process,. During the elections periods political parties seek to validate their activities, claiming those as protests for the fraudulent result of the election. It is seen that these violent activities are mostly carried out by the youth wing of the political parties. It caused fear for women and men and created a lack of interest among the youth towards participating in the election.

Through this project, youth engagement in the process of national development was ensured. For this reason JAAGO aimed to create a positive impact on the election environment by turning the youth into the promoter of peace, where they were motivated to refrain from violence instead of waging them. Since JAAGO has a huge young volunteer force countrywide it was a lot easier to convey the message.

Objective

Promoting peace during the election and increasing youth participation in national elections through a huge array of awareness building through community engaging activities.

Activity Details

The nationwide campaign of “I pledge for peace” was launched in the National Youth Assembly 2018. To create awareness all over Bangladesh different activities were launched in 64 districts. JAAGO Foundation was the key responsible organization and its Youth development Program (YDP) management team and program management team (PMT) did the overall management and monitoring of the project based on a culture scoping.

Cultural Activities:

Cultural activities like Flash Mobs in University level with the help of a cultural club Roadshow, Cultural/Comedy Show, were held in respective districts to create awareness and peace building behavior through these cultural programs.

Campaign:

As a part of the “I pledge for peace” campaign, a signature campaign was held where 1 Million signatures were collected for a peaceful election. After completing this pre-phase, dialogues with the local government in 20 districts took place to present the opinion of youths in order to increase the arena of this peace building campaign. The whole campaign was designed as target based and region based as well as inclusive.

Online Activities:

To ensure successful implementation of the activities we established partnerships with the media to reach mass people through the media. We created an online platform, website, talk shows, and promotional videos to reach the youth. Print and TV media for reaching general and mass people and community radio for the local community. Digital Tracking or GPS tracker may be introduced to trace out the Van which may be used for signing campaigns. For cultural shows and making promotional videos, we worked on theme based content.