With the generous support from Milt Lauenstein and the DT Institute BEP was able to award two small grants to the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Horn of Africa Women Empowerment Network Kenya Agency (HAWENKA).
Developing and Using Indicator Frameworks for Locally led Peacebuilding in Central Africa
Lead Organization: Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
This study contributes to the definition and measurement of effectiveness in the field of peacebuilding at the national and community level. More specifically, the study will answer the two following questions:
• What are useful and contextualized indicators to measure the effectiveness of peacebuilding efforts?
• How do indicators aimed at the assessment of locally led efforts differ from indicators assessing broader peacebuilding efforts?
The research is being conducted in collaboration with partners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.
Challenging all Norms to Achieve Peace: How Indigenous Women Overcome Competitive Victimhood to Address Intercommunal Violence in Northern Kenya
Lead Organization: Horn of Africa Women Empowerment Network Kenya Agency (HAWENKA)
In the last two decades, peacebuilding interventions has faced spiral challenges of traditional structural and cultural obstacles, leading to their dismal success. Despite that, local interventions led by indigenous women has since registered some acceptance, relief, hope and peace. The first change on the ground has been the gradual and effective inclusion of women in the male-dominated peacebuilding sector. The success has been achieved by HAWENKA – a local and women-led NGO. Using indigenous initiatives to overcome significant biases, the women initiatives have also managed to resolve major conflicts between the Gare and the Ajuran clans in Eldanaba and Bute areas in Mandera and Wajir counties respectively. Likewise, their initiatives have seen drastic achievement of peace between the Gare and the Murrule Clans, besides making successful interventions on preventing and countering violent extremism in Mandera County, where well-funded initiatives by the government and international organizations have failed over the years. This leads to the fundamental questions of this research project.
What did HAWENKA, and other local organizations, do differently from the previous interventions? This can be simplified into three as follows:
- How do the indigenous women navigate the entrenched structural barriers in peacebuilding to succeed where other (more established) actors have faced rejection or minimal achievement?
- What lessons can the international peace actors, mostly funders in the Global North, learn from the underlying indigenous knowledge among ‘local’ women in peacebuilding
- What are the opportunities for scaling up the success stories and implementation frameworks at local level to ensure sustainable peace in some of the most volatile regions of Kenya?