EIU Best Practices Series No. 47: Building Zones of Peace: Peace Education Programme; A Case from Costa Rica

Building Zones of Peace (BZP) is a non-formal peace and global citizen education programme created to promote peace and prevent violence in vulnerable urban communities in Costa Rica. The programme aims to encourage participants to develop a critical view of their contexts and explore different ways of taking action to transform the world we live in, and by recognizing how individual and collective efforts have a positive and direct impact in our personal, family and community spheres as well as nationally and globally.
In 2017, BZP was conducted to a group of secondary education students ages 13 to 17. This year (2018), participants are young women, ages 18 to 22, all of the mothers who live in extreme poverty. These women have been selected by a governmental office whose aim is to reduce poverty by empowering them. Several resources and networks of support have been created in different areas such as health, employment, childcare and education to achieve this goal. In this sense, our programme was chosen to contribute significantly in this process.