“Localised approaches encourage ownership”: Supporting community-led peacebuilding

At the heart of sustainable peacebuilding lies local ownership. We believe that supporting community-led peacebuilding efforts is crucial to addressing the multifaceted nature of the crises people face in conflict-affected contexts. In two of our projects in Sudan and Yemen, we have adopted a Participatory Action Learning in Conflict (PALC) approach, supporting local communities to spearhead peacebuilding initiatives and build their own learning systems.

Through our project in Sudan, we support civil society and community groups to resolve and prevent conflicts, build civil society networks across divides, and feed into the political transition process and into conflict-sensitive responses to the armed conflict. In Yemen, we support initiatives led by women and young people to respond to peace, security and safety challenges.

Mid-way through the projects we brought together staff and partners from Kenya, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen at a cross-organisational learning workshop in Naivasha, Kenya, to learn from each other about how we are collectively supporting community-led peacebuilding approaches. During the workshop, we reflected on how we can advocate for the kind of structural reforms that will drive necessary changes in the wider aid system and how we can ‘decolonise’ our work. Abdullahi, from our partner Somali Women Solidarity Organization, spoke about the importance of supporting community-led initiatives to ensure the sustainability of interventions beyond projects: “I would love to see more direct support for the community-led initiatives, and to support community-based organisations.”

What did we learn?

A lot is the short answer! The full learning paper that we developed following the workshop came in at 53 pages (we will publish a shorter summary briefing in October), but several key learnings emerged from the workshop:

• Giving flexible small grants that are light on bureaucracy to civil society groups increases the impacts of their work, their network-building and their influencing capacities. 
• ​Investing in institutional and staff training and organisational development is crucial to promoting the sustainability of civil society groups and organisations.
• Protecting the space for civil society groups to determine the issues they want to work on means designing projects that have broad but also context-specific objectives and outcome areas – rather than pre-determined specific results.
• A mutual learning approach to providing technical support and accompaniment is effective and useful if it is based on civil society partners’ priorities.
• Targeted support for the meaningful participation of women activists and women-led and women’s rights groups is an effective entry point into broader community action and for opening space for women’s leadership.​
• Flexibility for partners, national NGOs and civil society organisations (CSOs) to adapt their initiatives to the context makes this kind of programming more resilient and increases the potential for replication across contexts. ​ 

“We should stop treating partners with condescension. We should stop implementing ready-made projects and copying external experiences in Yemen. Yemen’s situation is very unique. It should have its own experience and its own projects.  We can learn from others’ experiences, but we shouldn’t copy their experiences. For projects to succeed they must be Yemeni projects.” Bahi, Peace for Sustainable Societies Foundation, Yemen.

What next?

We want to redesign the way international institutions and systems engage in conflict-affected places, and work with peacebuilders and decision makers to create humanitarian, peace and development systems that prevent and transform violent conflict. The current renewed focus on discarding colonial and racist aid practices in favour of genuine solidarity presents a good opportunity for us to reflect and further deepen our work with civil society and to influence the practice of others. In the coming months we are looking forward to further engaging with colleagues and peers in important ongoing policy processes – such as the development of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s ‘locally led approaches’ strategy – that present an opportunity for us to collectively ‘do better’.

We believe the best way to do this is for donors and INGOs is to:

• provide flexible, long-term funding   
• fund CSOs that represent and support women, young people or other marginalised groups   
• prioritise supporting organisations that demonstrate good partnership practice and principles and which include these in their criteria for funding  
• facilitate direct and transparent communication between donors and CSOs/national NGOs   
• commit to investing resources in capacity exchange between CSOs and international NGOs and make this a central aspect of every project 

The lessons and recommendations emerging from this assessment will be used to further develop and transform our work in these two countries as well as to reflect on their relevance to Saferworld’s broader programmatic portfolio; and to influence national and international actors and processes. In the spirit of solidarity with others in this sector, we would also like to share what came out of this cross-organisational learning exercise externally, in hope that it will inspire broader change within the sector and spark collective action to advance locally-led approaches to peacebuilding. Stay tuned for our partnerships podcast episode to be published very soon where we’ll expand on some of this in conversation with Saferworld CEO Susana Klien!