Create a Youth-Led Violence Interruption Programme for a Lagos Neighbourhood

Interpersonal and gang-related violence in Lagos neighbourhoods like Agege, Orile, and parts of Mushin involves young men between 15 and 28 as both perpetrators and victims. State security responses are often counterproductive, creating cycles of reprisal and distrust. The international evidence base for violence interruption, built by organisations like Cure Violence in Chicago and Ceasefire in the UK, points strongly toward credible messenger models: people who have lived the experience, who carry trust in the community, and who can interrupt conflict before it escalates. No Nigerian city has a formally structured, youth-led violence interruption programme operating at scale. There are informal versions in many neighbourhoods, individuals who play exactly this role, but they operate without training, without institutional backing, and without a model that can be replicated or evaluated. Building that model is the task. Your deliverable is a programme design document for a youth-led violence interruption initiative in one specific Lagos neighbourhood of your choice. The document should cover: the recruitment and selection criteria for violence interrupters, the training curriculum outline for the first cohort (you do not need to write the full curriculum, just the structure and topics), the operational protocol for responding to a conflict incident, the community trust-building activities that run in parallel, and a monitoring framework with three to five indicators that would show the programme is working. The document should be 2,000 to 2,500 words, written in plain English. The best submissions will engage seriously with the tensions in this kind of work: the risk of interrupters being re-recruited into violence, the challenge of operating without police cooperation but also without police obstruction, and the question of what happens when an incident exceeds the capacity of the programme to contain. You do not need to solve these tensions, but you need to show you have thought about them.