Radha Rajkotia (IRC) and Jason Wolfe (USAID/MD) announce the launch of an open paper on economic strengthening approaches for youth in conflict, and invite you to participate in creating it.
A few months ago, we gave a joint presentation to the Washington Network on Children in Armed Conflict to examine the relative merits of applying sustainable livelihoods and value chain approaches to the needs of unemployed youth in conflict-affected environments. We found the discussion and interaction fascinating, and others seemed to be interested in both what we had to say as well as the questions we thought remained to be answered. In the afterglow of this event, the CYES folks somehow talked us into taking our collaboration forward and writing a paper exploring economic approaches for youth in conflict.
Well, once the excitement wore off, we realized we were going to need a lot of help if our paper was going to be accurate, relevant, and useful. We found our dialogue on this topic and the discussion we were able to have with others almost more valuable than any new conclusions we finally agreed to. Short of publicly locking ourselves in a bubble, how could we maintain this kind of transparency and interaction with the audience while writing a paper?
We didn’t have to look far for inspiration. David Roodman of the Center for Global Development recently launched his “open book blog” as an experiment in writing his new book on microfinance. As David noted, “Some books are written by experts wanting to share their expertise. In contrast, I am writing this book in order to become an expert. Writing it is a voyage of discovery.” We couldn’t agree more with our humble task at hand and are in great debt to him for demonstrating how to use this new medium.
So how will this work? We’ll be experimenting with this as we go, but here are the basics. The paper will consist of five main sections, focusing on economic strengthening for youth in conflict. Over the next 12 months, we will periodically upload section drafts in Microsoft Word (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) formats as a main post in the blog, so that you can comment on the drafts by commenting on these posts. We’ve set up a home page for this project that you can always refer to in order to see all posts. You can also search for or click on the tags for “open paper” to get this information. We will make periodic posts along the way to share our thinking, point out new resources or ideas we’ve found, or ask for your own insights, expertise, and experiences. We sincerely hope you’ll take the opportunity, help point us in the right direction and keep us honest.
In our next post we’ll share our plans for the structure of the open paper, so please be sure to check in again soon. In the meantime, please let us know what you think of this whole initiative and any potential pitfalls we should try to avoid!
- Radha & Jason
Click here for the next post in the Open Paper series.
