An ambitious project to bring young people from two sides of a trouble-hit part of Africa face to face is to be held in Oxford this summer.

Organisers of the Talk Together project are in the process of selecting teenagers from a conflict zone in the Western/Moroccan Sahara to take part in the scheme.

It will include 15 to 17-year-olds from refugee camps in Layounne and Tindouf in Algeria and young people from Morocco.

It is hoped that bringing the two different side will change their attitudes and also build relationships for the future.

They are also receiving applications from students from a college in Norway who will take part as neutrals.

Talk Together project consultant Melissa Mehta said: “We have been working on this for three or four years and we are finally ready to get it running.

“If we can develop the understanding that these young people have of the world they are living in and the world on the other side, then that will be progress to start with.”

Forty teenagers will travel to St Edward’s School, Woodstock Road, for two weeks in August.

They will learn to work with people on the other side of the conflict through team building, leadership and sport activities.

Oxford PhD students will brief the teenagers on the conflict area’s history, geography, politics and economics.

They will also be taught negotiation skills and encouraged to empathise with their peers in role playing games.

Ms Mehta said: “Hopefully they will go back and spread the word among their communities.”

Those taking part in the project will then present their ideas to political leaders both in the UK and in their own countries.

The idea originally came from students at the Red Cross Nordic United World College, in Norway and the project was put together with the help of Education aBc, which runs English summer schools in locations including St Edward’s School.

The driving force behind it, Andrew Brown of Education aBc, said: “Potentially this could be huge and produce both new ideas for this situation and a new attitude towards conflict resolution.

“Realistically, I think it will be a little push in the right direction, which might encourage politicians to be a bit more constructive in their negotiations and not so confrontational.”

A fly-on-the-wall documentary will follow the scheme from the teenagers’ day-to-day lives in the conflict zone through to the course in Oxford.

It is planned to run the project every other year with other conflict zones under consideration including Israel and Palestine, and Kashmir.

The course costs about £80,000 and filming will cost at least £15,000, with support coming from St Edward’s School, Red Cross Nordic United World College, a conflict resolution specialist in Slovenia and Education aBc.