Chapter 3: Education for Peace Through Workshops and Comics for Youths in Africa

Many young people grow up in a climate of violence and oppression. As a result, they themselves often do not know how to develop in a peaceful society and are unaware of their opportunities and rights. This is where the Academie Bilimon comes in, offering young people between 14 and 27 years of age workshops and materials like handbooks and comics to live in peace and in solidarity with others. Peers are used as workshop leaders in the sense of peer teaching. These workshop concepts for global citizenship education (GCE) of the Academie Bilimon were made available in form of a handbook in seven different languages among them also African languages like Swahili, Haussa, Ewe and Kabiyè (Noglo & Stein, 2023 ; https://www.bilimonacademie.org/materiel-didactiques/bd).

This chapter introduces the concept of the Academie Bilimon and also the peer teaching book project, in which students from Togo and Germany, based on the workshops and Freire’s (2013) didactic-methodological approaches, developed a handbook for youth education in practical areas of life, such as identity development, responsible sexuality, vocational promotion, social engagement, interculturality, democracy building, peace education or education for sustainable development (ESD). The materials and teaching methods or skills gathered in the handbook were translated from the German language into French, English, Kiswahili, Haussa, Ewe and Kabiyè. The handbook for peer teaching is available online and free of charge and is used in schools, universities and workshops for youth leaders, teachers and headmasters all over Africa (Noglo & Stein, 2023 ; https://www.bilimonacademie.org/materiel-didactiques/bd).