EYPD

The quietest upgrade you can give your day is cleaning up your feed before it gets to you.

We tend to forget that what we look at all day doesn't just stay on the screen. A single bitter comment or a wave of online hostility has a sneaky way of following you around, setting a dark tone for the rest of your day, creeping into your work, or sitting in the back of your mind while you try to relax.

Living in that is exhausting. It is genuinely bad for your health to sit there and absorb it—and it is just as bad for everyone else sharing that space. Yet most of us keep scrolling past, letting the trash pile up until our digital and mental environment becomes suffocating.

TAKE OUT THE TOXICITY.

Block, report, and clear it out.

You don't need to make a scene or start a debate to make a difference. You just need to draw a boundary.

When you block, you safeguard your own peace. But when you report, you do something bigger, you stop that hostility from landing on the screen of someone who might be having their hardest day. Every report clears a piece of the path for the rest of us.

Taking out the trash isn't dramatic. It won't get you likes, and no one is going to send you a thank-you note for protecting your quiet or looking out for the community. But every time you hit those buttons, you choose health over noise, and you make the internet a little more breathable for everyone behind a screen.

You deserve a space that doesn't drain you, and so does the person scrolling next to you. Treat your feed like your home and keep it clean.

The best post I ever made was the one I never sent.

Most of us have a version of it. A reply typed out in full while the anger was still fresh. A screenshot ready to forward before anyone had checked where it came from. A comment that would have felt good for about four seconds.

Nothing happens when you delete it. There is no notification for the argument that did not start, no thank you from the person who was never dragged into it, no record of the rumour that stopped moving because one person decided not to pass it on.

That is the difficulty with restraint. It leaves no evidence. It is invisible work, and in a country where a single post can harden into real suspicion between neighbours, it is some of the most valuable work any of us do.

So this is for everyone who has held their thumb over send and closed the app instead. It counted. Do it again today.

Youth for Peace project is implemented by Ethiopian Youth for Peace and Development, with the support of the Life & Peace Institute, under the Sowing the Seeds of Peace in Ethiopia programme.

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Words carry weight, both on and off the screen. In the digital world, a single post, comment, or share can either fan the flames of conflict or help heal broken trust.

Threatening speech and offensive language trap our communities in division, but thoughtful, caring voices can break the cycle.

So the next time you post, ask yourself , Does this message bring peace or just add to the storm-be the voice that unbinds conflict and chooses to heal.

Youth for Peace project, is implemented by Ethiopian Youth for Peace and Development, with the support of the Life & Peace Institute, under the Sowing the Seeds of Peace in Ethiopia programme.

Every positive change starts with a single step. Small acts of service create ripples of impact that strengthen local communities, foster peace, and build a brighter future for all.

Whether it's environmental protection, humanitarian action, community support, or youth empowerment, your hands-on action helps drive national progress.

Register today: https://forms.gle/CDCcj9D8sxTgsTfG6

Today we are launching a three-month digital peace campaign under Youth for Peace (Y4P) project. It begins with a message that belongs to all of us: pause before you post.

Online hate is not a separate world from the one we live in. A rumour forwarded before it is checked, a caption written in anger, a video stripped of its context: these move faster than verified information, and they do not stop at the screen. They harden into suspicion between neighbours, silence in classrooms, and fear in communities that are still recovering.

The difficult truth is that most harmful content is not spread by people who set out to cause harm. It is spread by ordinary users in a hurry. That also means the response is within reach of every one of us.

Before you share, ask three questions. Is it verified? Who benefits from it spreading? What will it do to someone else?

Youth for Peace is implemented by Ethiopian Youth for Peace and Development, with the support of the Life & Peace Institute, under the Sowing the Seeds of Peace in Ethiopia programme.

Applications are now open for EYPD's National Volunteer Programme.

Ethiopian Youth for Peace and Development (EYPD) is launching a national volunteer programme that will mobilise thousands of young people to serve and strengthen communities across the country.

The programme will run in four cohorts, each lasting three months, with 3,500 volunteers in every cohort. Volunteers are organised into Community Action Teams (CAT): local teams that plan and lead practical initiatives in their own communities. Their work ranges from sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and mental health awareness campaigns to environmental protection, blood donation drives, and support community.

Applications take around five minutes to complete.

Apply now: https://forms.gle/CDCcj9D8sxTgsTfG6

We can help ensure that every young person has the opportunity to thrive.

Yesterday, we were honored to welcome H.E. Fassikaw Molla, Deputy Director General of the Authority for Civil Society Organizations (ACSO), to our office for a courtesy visit.

Our conversation centered on a conviction we share: youth-led civil society organizations must be strengthened to play their full part in Ethiopia's future.

We walked through EYPD's five strategic pillars and our positioning across the humanitarian, development, and peace nexus, together with the scope of work we are planning in the period ahead. In turn, we were grateful to receive practical guidance on several areas of our programming.

The timing is good for us. We are preparing to extend our programmes into underserved and hard-to-reach areas beyond Addis Ababa, and the direction we gained from ACSO will help us get that expansion right.

Sincere thanks to H.E. Fassikaw for making the time and for a frank and useful conversation.
Ergogie Tesfaye
Oxfam
የሴቶችና ማህበራዊ ጉዳይ ሚኒስቴር Ministry of Women and Social Affairs
Embassy of Sweden, Addis Ababa
Afro Arab Youth Council مجلس الشباب العربي والأفريقي

Today we welcomed Dr. Halefom Gezaei (Ph.D.), Chief Program Officer at Imagine1day, and his colleague to the Ethiopian Youth for Peace and Development office in Addis Ababa.

The conversation kept returning to one place: the point at which education and peace stop being two separate agendas.

In regions still carrying the weight of conflict, whether a school opens, who teaches in it, and whether a young person feels safe on the walk there are not administrative questions. They sit on the same fault lines as everything else.

An education programme in those places is doing peacebuilding work whether or not it calls it that, and peacebuilding that offers young people no way back into learning or into work rarely holds for long.

Humanitarian response belongs in the same picture. In displacement, education, peace and humanitarian need are not three separate problems. They arrive together, in the same young person. Someone who has spent years in a settlement without a classroom needs all three at once, and too often receives none of them.

As part of our Youth for Peace (Y4P): Empowering Youth as Leaders in Peacebuilding project-supported by the Life & Peace Institute, we organized a virtual introductory briefing for our newly selected second cohort Peace Champions! These young leaders were rigorously selected from Addis Ababa, Afar, Tigray, and Amhara.

Over the coming months, this diverse cohort will undergo comprehensive skills training and launch a three-month, youth-led campaign dedicated to reducing online harms and promoting peace-themed narratives.