For many years, Dinithi dedicated her time to empower young people and ensure better social cohesion in her country, supporting capacity-building workshops for over 550 young people across Sri Lanka to promote youth development, and political and civic representation.
Her awarded project is an educational comic, whose aim is to promote legal literacy among young people and empower them to demystify Sri Lanka’s laws, so as to better understand the role of law in their lives and community interactions.
This kind of youth action is crucial, especially now that Sri Lanka is facing a series of challenges, from increased hate speech, mistrust, and violence, to record youth unemployment. In 2021, one out of four young people were out of work in Sri Lanka.
Dinithi participated in UNESCO’s training, during which a tool for national youth stakeholders on how to effectively work and partner with young people, developed by UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences Sector, was piloted. The workshop gathered educators, young leaders and activists from Sri Lanka and the Maldives who, like Dinithi, act as changemakers in their communities.
Young people have a voice! We just need to give them the opportunities to be heard. To make this happen, UNESCO has developed a much-needed training tool on meaningful youth engagement to assist national policymakers in developing and implementing youth policies and programmes involving young people.
For Dinithi, a key takeaway of the training was the importance of switching from seeing young people as passive recipients, to active contributors, allowing them to develop their full potential, to ensure that positive change is achieved:
The training helped me better understand the importance of working together with young people when developing solutions for them. It is important to not only consider young people as beneficiaries in the interventions we plan, but also to work closely with them and hear their voices.
Following the training, Dinithi adjusted her project, to involve more young people in all the stages of its development, so that it can better respond to their needs and realities:
The initial project plan had very limited direct intervention of young people at the planning stage. After the training, I added a perception survey to understand their interests and capture real life scenarios that can inspire the storyline of the educational comic. Further, the project has partnered with a youth- and female-led non-profit organization to provide expert input at all stages of the project. The comic itself will be illustrated by young artists who will be able to contribute their creative input.
Dinithi is determined more than ever to build partnerships with other young people to address the challenges they face. She is also planning to organize Training of Trainer sessions, to promote legal literacy among community-based young people in three provinces in Sri Lanka, which builds on UNESCO’s training.
