Nigeria - a country of immense wealth and potential - is riven by so many conflicts and challenges that even its most optimistic citizens often wonder how it can hold together and move forward. Fridays with Fatima is a series of short video conversations with Fatima Madaki - a young activist for education, gender equity and youth engagement in peacebuilding.  

Transcript:

I am Fatima Madaki.

I work with Search for Common Ground Nigeria on peacebuilding, human rights and youth engagement. 

I'm grateful for an opportunity to be able to share a little bit about the work that a lot of young people are doing back home, and I hope that more people would have an opportunity to talk about the interesting things that they're doing. I love hearing stories of change and development. It's what keeps us going.  I'd like to use this as an opportunity to speak to every young person out there - that the responsibility lies on our shoulders now, the potential to change the world to a better place. 

It's possible. We might not understand the politics, like the economic dimension that could be stifling, but that hope is more than enough, because sometimes that's just what someone out there needs to see that they are not standing alone. It's really frustrating, you know, when you feel isolated, that it's probably just you working hard to see that you changed this.

But a lot of us are out there. We just need to find each other, hold hands and, and move forward, and also move away from this thinking that, for instance, development work is about self opportunities to attend conferences, place pictures on social media.  That is good because we need to tell the story. But it's beyond that. It's about real life issues.

It's about at the end of the day, what are the little things we can do at different levels to ensure that all lives are spared.  Watch for the next episode of Fridays With Fatima. AllAfrica's reporting on peacebuilding is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.