Wasafiri is a consultancy and institute helping leaders and organisations tackle the toughest problems.

Ten million young Africans enter the workforce each year, but only three million new job opportunities area created. This has African and European policy-makers quivering in their shiny shoes.

On our blog, we’ve written before about how we feel that within the CVE (countering violent extremism) sector, research and programming can - for a variety of reasons related to sensitivity and confidentiality - become problematically siloed. More and more though we’re also noticing a wider problem of siloing, which is that CVE work as a whole is often treated in isolation from the wider conflict, peacebuilding and governance field..

Trying to work out if the money spent on development projects has made a real difference is hard; when this money is directed at sensitive and intangible goals like countering violent extremism (CVE), this gets even harder. CVE programmes, by nature, are designed with ambitious goals; they often seek to reduce or eliminate the violent extremist threat in a specific area, which is seemingly impossible to prove. So how, then, do we try to identify any sort of impact or changes in CVE programmes and attribute these changes to specific interventions?