When the five month-long siege of Marawi in 2017 turned the commercial centre of her province into a battleground for violent extremists and national armed forces, Khuzaimah Mangatem, 28, did something about it.

Khuzaimah founded Thuma Ko Kapagingud Service to coordinate aid efforts during the height of the Marawi crisis. NGOs flooded the scene but couldn’t reach remote areas where people were fleeing to.

“We mapped out areas that were not included on the databases of the government – meaning areas that aren’t included as the priority of the government for relief distribution,” Khuzaimah said.

Now, she lives among 140 families in transitional housing for internally displaced people in Lanao del Norte and works to have their concerns heard by government. The focus of her work is on socially excluded youth. These are young people who have never had formal education and have not previously benefited from community projects.

Her organisation partners with governments and private institutions and acts as the local mobiliser for training on leadership, personal discovery and project proposal workshops.

“Youth are responsible for identifying the problems in their own communities and identifying the solutions that best fit,” she said. “A lot of government units in our province do not have data on how many socially excluded youth are in their communities because according to them, there’s no use in getting that data because no interventions are coming that are intended to help them.”

That corresponds directly with the problem of violent extremism in the province. She said it’s the dislocation from the rest of society, coupled with the lack of hope for the future that makes young people susceptible to the promises of violent extremists.

“If we are to look at the landscape of who is involved in terrorist activities, these are the youth that are coming from areas that do not feel like they are part of the larger society,” she said. “We go to communities identified as high-risk and give the leadership training because we want to show them that there are other options,” she said. “Not all people are apathetic towards them.”

It is important for her to rebuild trust between excluded groups and the government because the perception of being invisible allows violent extremists to capitalise on the idea that the government has forgotten them.