Social exclusion and violence:
Education for social cohesion

Peace and Anti-Violence Education (PAVE)

Nigeria

The Peace and Anti-Violence Education (PAVE) is a project established by the Women's Centre for Peace and Development (WOPED) in some Nigerian schools. It aims to contribute to education for peace, human rights and democracy.
The Pave Club is an educational outreach project targeting junior and senior secondary school students in Nigeria, aimed at inculcating in them new perspectives and attitudes needed to pave the way for a new culture of respect for the human rights of women and children in peace and freedom from violence.

The PAVE was established in seven schools which expanded to ten clubs in ten junior and senior secondary schools in three of the geo-political zones of Nigeria in the year 2000. The members are known as Pavers.
The selection of members for the club is on the basis of exemplary, discliplined behaviour, good academic standing and a social record, in order to generate role models and peer educators for their fellow students in other schools and communities. Deliberate effort is made to reach schools in low-income communities, rural and sub-urban in order to enable the program to touch the lives of those who most need the message.
The Pave project has contributed to efforts in combatting the culture of violence that pervades our society, especially by empowering the coming generation with peacemaking skills of peer to peer education, mediation, dialogue and consensus building, for conflict transformation and non-violent social change. Some of the Pavers have featured on Live Talk Show programmes on public and privately owned televisions in Nigeria.

The establishment of the the Pave clubs was designed as the response of WOPED to the appalling rate of violence against women and children in society and violence among youth themselves. The WOPED Pave project remains a veritable vehicle of social change and peace building for the present and coming generations.

Theresa Akumadu
Executive Director Women's Centre for Peace and Development (WOPED)
Tel /fax : +234 1 452 89 53
Tel : 23 1 773 10 15
e-mail : woped@infoweb.abs.net

Institutional Partners
The Hague Appeal for Peace
International Peace Bureau (IPB)
Financial Partners
Global Fund for Women

Established in 1998