By Brian Mboh
Local Youth Corner Cameroon, LOYOC, through its Project Manager, Mansuru Usuman, carried the country’s voice at the 2026 edition of the Acceleration Week for the Global Youth Development Program, with a presentation on LOYOC’s major flagship sports for peace project, dubbed “NA WE WE”, as an effective model to promote peace, social cohesion, and healthy living between displaced persons and host communities in Cameroon.
The one-week youth conclave, which kicked off on June 11 to 17, 2026, in Shanghai and Wuhan, China, brought together about 200 youth-led program leaders across the globe. Mentors include heads of UN agencies, accelerators, investment institutions, foundations, NGOs, and established enterprises.
Coordinators include professional experts from UN agencies and international organizations.
The Acceleration Week is composed of pre-meetings, a launching ceremony, workshops, partnership meetings, networking activities, and study visits. Youth leaders will be grouped into eight thematic clusters, with each cluster comprising approximately 25 programs. Throughout the week, the youth leaders will have access to professional guidance on business models, market connections, partnership strategies, financial sustainability, social impact, and so on. They will also be connected with Chinese enterprises, investment institutions, and accelerators to build partnerships. Each of the programs could be publicized globally through “Voice of Youth” videos and a wide range of media coverage.
Speaking in China, LOYOC Project Manager, said the event serves as an opportunity for exchanges and partnership building. As well as seek new support, to assistant the Non-Governmental Organisation in running its activities in Cameroon.
“I am here in China, representing Cameroon, at the Global Week Acceleration Program as one of the delegates from over 120 countries globally. This platform is a very important means, for me as a young person because it gives me the opportunity to network and share with my peers. The event is very important for LOYOC, in that it gives an opportunity to build new partnerships, seek for support, and to share our locally-led initiatives.”
“Local Youth Corner Cameroon is an organisation created in 2002, with the aim of supporting youth people across the ten regions of the country to address the social, political, and economic challenges that they are facing. LOYOC has been one of the locally youth-led organisations that has been spearheading the implementation of the youth, peace and security agenda in Cameroon. Working in close collaboration with UN agencies, international organisations, and Civil Society Groups.
Within our different programs, we have been able to support different youth-led organisations and young people in the country by building their capacities and supporting them in implementing different projects in their communities through sub-grants. These opportunities give an insight and shape our programming back home to see how to better support young people, to participate actively and inclusively addressing challenges that actually concerns them,” Mansuru explained.
About NA-WE-WE Sports Jamboree
Five years ago, Local Youth Corner Cameroon, LOYOC, had a simple but powerful conviction: that sports and recreational activities have the ability to build social cohesion, moral, civic, and entrepreneurial rearmament between and among diverse groups of people.
It could bring people together across lines of fear, displacement, and difference. It could create space for young people who had been forced from their homes to stand on a pitch alongside the people who had received them, and find, in the shared language of play, something worth protecting together.
That conviction became the Na We We Sports Jamboree. Na We We, meaning “We are one”, is now one of LOYOC’s most visible and impactful peacebuilding programmes. It has grown from a local youth-led initiative in Yaounde into an annual Jamboree that moves across Cameroon’s regions, taking its message of social cohesion to the communities that need it most.
This year, it arrives in Tiko, Fako Division, South West Region, from July 4 to 30 August 2026 for its 5th Edition, under the theme: Stronger Together in Times of Crisis Through Sports.
strained resources, heightened tensions, and the slow erosion of trust that comes when fear goes unaddressed. Young people on both sides of that divide risked becoming isolated, radicalised, or simply lost.
LOYOC’s response was to build something joyful. A sports and recreational activity where every team is deliberately composed of both IDPs and host community members. Where team names like Peace, Solidarity, Tolerance, and Love are not decorative but instructional. Where, before each match, a player takes five minutes to speak to the crowd about what their team name means, and what it demands of all of us.
