UNESCO and UNDP in partnership with WB4ALL are organising a Peacebuilding and Literacy through Tech Innovation Bootcamp for 16 students from the University of Juba from October 24 - 28, 2016 at the Regency Hotel in Juba, South Sudan.

The purpose of the bootcamp is to develop two mobile applications (“apps”) aiming at educating South Sudanese youth on the process of building a peaceful and literate nation as well as to encourage a culture of peaceful co-existence.

The two mobile apps are: 1) The PeaceApp that will explain different terms relating to conflict, violence, and its impact. It will also outline the peacebuilding process with a focus on the role of an ordinary citizen (Mwathinin) in the national peace building agenda. 2) The LiteracyApp seeks to enable youth, especially secondary school and university students, to increase their level of literacy by encouraging them to enrol in the UNESCO Literacy Course.

This bootcamp is the follow up to a series of previous YouthMobile workshops which have involved 43 young South Sudanese students on mobile app development since 2014. While the curricula of the previous workshops were based on the MIT App Inventor, participants in this bootcamp will receive advanced training on the Android App.

The one-week bootcamp is organised within the framework of the joint UNDP—UNESCO activities on the new concept of Communicating with Communities (CwC). Through this concept, the UNDP and UNESCO are strengthening together community-based communications that nurture dialogue and contribute to homegrown solutions for peaceful co-existence. This bootcamp also includes UNESCO’s Youth Mobile Project, an initiative that strives to provide young people with high-level skills and confidence to develop, promote and sell locally relevant mobile apps that solve issues of sustainable development and employment.