SCCRR`s Peacebuilding approach (research/analysis-based conflict intervention) is designed to empower and enhance the capacities of ethnic communities in conflict stricken environments to be the architects of their own future. This process entails professionally assisting them with analytical and technical skills to prevent and transform intractable inter-ethnic conflicts. Most of these intractable violent conflicts in rural Eastern Africa and major urban informal settlements occur as a result of exclusion or marginalization, and sometimes because of inequality or relative deprivation between ethnic groups.
In the month of May, SCCRR is focusing on an adaptive peacebuilding approach that provides sufficient participation of the affected communities to create an environment for resilience and sustainable peace. The optimal aim is to address the underlying potential for violence. SCCRR has planned project activities that assist the different ethnic communities sustain and enhance their existing structured peace processes by investing in their social cohesion and strengthening the resilience of their social institutions at the grassroots level. The planned activities have also focused on holding situational analysis on different conflict areas such as Marsabit, Samburu and Turkana-West Pokot borderline to identify and validate the underlying root causes. This is a crucial and critical element for sustainability as it will assist SCCRR in monitoring both the intended and unintended results to inform the peacebuilding interventions at the different levels. The project activities will target at least 400 influential stakeholders with particular attention given to gender and youth representation.
SCCRR will also be carrying out needs assessment in 6 identified inter-ethnic and interreligious schools along the Kisumu-Nandi borderline, Nairobi and Marsabit counties in preparation for Shalom-SCCRR’s future material to encourage participation and enrollment of students from different ethnic communities, thus solidifying conflict transformation and peace processes.
SCCRR is committed in ensuring that the different ethnic communities and other stakeholders engage in a structured participatory learning process that enables them make an effort in developing innovative systems of co-existence-that contributes in fostering sustainable peace and development.
Our gratitude goes to the very skilled Shalom-SCCRR team in Nairobi enriched by the frequent expert advice from Rev. Dr. Patrick Devine and the management expertise from Fr. Oliver Noonan, MA. The unwavering commitment and skillful expertise of the team that are working towards the implementation of Shalom-SCCRR’s program is contributing a great deal towards community empowerment to a degree that cannot be compared.
On behalf of the Shalom-SCCRR team and all the beneficiaries, we offer our thanks all of you who tirelessly support us by making it possible to achieve sustainable peacebuilding and development interventions among the conflicting communities in Eastern Africa.
By SCCRR Program Management Team:
Joyce Wamae Kamau, BA, MA, Program Manager, Urban Settlement Program
Godfrey Okoth Onyango, BA, MA, Director of Programs
Paulson Tadeo Erot, BA, MA, Program Manager, Northern Kenya Program
