After ISIS took control of Sinjar in August 2014, killing hundreds of young Iraqi Yazidi males and kidnapping hundreds of female hostages who it later sold into slavery. Anti-ISIS forces cleared Sinjar in November 2015 but more than three years later, the district remains politically contested between the federal government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) returning residents who believe that the local and national governments are not prioritizing their needs. To empower youth in a remote and inaccessible post-ISIS area, the Youth Bridge Development Organization (YBDO) formed and built the capacity of a volunteer team of 16 people on civic values, leadership skills, communication skills, advocacy techniques, monitoring, and documentation skills to be to monitor service delivery and enhance government accountability in the district. As well as the YBDO launched a public electronic survey that allows citizens to identify projects in need of follow up and YBDO will also solicit feedback from specialists in those fields on delayed projects. And the YBDO and the volunteers then conducted field visits to document the state of the projects and interviewed citizens and seek their input on service delivery through a survey.
Based on those activities, the volunteers wrote up six two-page reports that they along with YBDO’s leadership used in advocacy meetings with various decision-makers in Sinjar and with the provincial government officials in Mosul. The purpose of these meetings will be to advocate for better governance in Sinjar. The YBDO published 3 inclusive reports on the states of services in Sinjar throughout the project.
National Endowmnet for Democracy (NED)Project Activities
- September 8, 2019
