This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable.

Interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers

working to solve the world's biggest problems.

My name is Victor O'Schen. I am the executive director for African Youth Initiative Network.

I am from Uganda, and my solvable is to work hard and end civil wars in Africa,

hopefully in my lifetime. So our guest this week is quite a remarkable person.

Victor was the first Ugandan and the youngest ever African to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

That was for his human rights work.

He's basically a peace builder, working in parts of the world where peace is most needed.

There are 54 countries in Africa and despite a long history of colonialism and the newer and potentially even more deadly reality

of climate chaos, many African nations are managing to flourish. Today though, our solvable

is the 15 African countries that are currently

involved in wars. Victor knows firsthand what it's like to come up in a war zone, having spent the first

21 years of his life as a refugee. He was one of the three million people displaced by the civil

war that has raged through

Uganda since the 1980s. That conflict has now spread to the neighboring countries of

South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Congo. Victor was born in 1981 during the Ugandan

Civil War, a period when many different rebel groups were fighting.

And then in 1987, he was only six years old and a particular rebel group sprang up in northern

Uganda, where he lived with his family, a group that became notorious worldwide.

They called themselves the Lord's Resistance Army, the LRA, and the LRA grew increasingly

...