The ‘ART’ of Finding Hope: Indigenous Art Methods (I AM) for promoting psychological recovery and social reintegration of Children and young people with experiences of the Boko Haram protracted armed conflict and Crisis – The Case of Niger and Chad.

My Hope is that one day, children of Lake-Chad region will live and learn in safe spaces (Mahamat and Alima, (females 14;12), GCRF networking research, (1) At the heart of the UN Convention on the Rights- of- the Child (2), is the mandate to promote psychological recovery and social reintegration of children affected by armed-conflict. Yet, 468 million or more than 1-in-6 children worldwide live in armed-conflict contexts. Africa remains a region with the highest number of children living in conflict-zones –around 183 million (3) GCRF networking research identified that children and young-people aged 6-16, affected by Boko-Haram attacks require urgent mental-health support for successful reintegration into school and society, and that Indigenous art methods (I AM) show significant promise in helping children navigate and manage experiences relating to the crisis and should be further tested, adapted, and scaled. This grant will bring together an interdisciplinary network of local art-based organisations, mental-health specialists, grassroots NGOs, art-therapists, psychosociologists and researchers in Niger, Chad and UK- to co-design and implement I AM workshops, aimed at developing educational capacity for promoting recovery and reintegration of children affected by the crisis in Niger and Chad. The research will document changes in children and young- people participating in the workshops, identify conditions needed for these transformations to occur. It will result in a toolkit and academic research papers to detail evidenced methods and approaches of of how I AM can be integrated into humanitarian education response at scale.