Our annual report for 2023-2024 reflects on our achievements and the challenges we faced working to build sustainable peace across North Africa, the Western Balkans, Europe and the Swahili Coast region. Read the report on the link below:
Our peacebuilding achievements highlighted in the annual report include:
Libya
In Libya, the Social Peace and Local Development project continued to build local stability and community resilience to conflict through supporting Social Peace Partnerships and Regional Hubs in 25 Municipalities across the east, south and west. In addition, we partnered with United Nations Development Programme, the Libyan Ministry of Local Government and Municipalities in 9 target areas, to support the production of community-led Local Peacebuilding and Development Plans that are now being used to guide resource mobilisation from both national and international funders for local development projects in Libya. We also continued to implement the Expanding civic space through providing technical support to local CSOs project, which aims to maintain– and, where possible, expand – a safe, open, and diverse civic space in Libya.
Mozambique
We provided conflict sensitivity guidance to a 30 million US dollar agricultural development programme in the north of the country. We also trained two INGOs, three national NGOs, and ten grassroot civil society organisations in peacebuilding, conflict analysis and conflict sensitivity, enabling them to develop conflict-sensitive initiatives to engage young men and women in peacebuilding activities.
Serbia-Kosovo
We evaluated our Amplifying local voices for equitable development project that ran between 2020 and 2024. The evaluation highlighted numerous project impacts, which are covered in more detail in the Serbia-Kosovo section of this report. We are most proud of our ability to work across communities in conflict through tackling issues of common concern to communities on both side of the divide. Our flexible and innovative approach has meant that we have been able to keep work going where other more formal processes have stalled. For example, facilitating cooperation between Serbian and Kosovan university faculties where formal cooperation is not possible. Such co-operation has built the foundations for future peacebuilding efforts and helped normalise working together.
Swahili Coast
Established new work in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania that aims to support youth-led networks and organisations to actively practice and disseminate learning on peacebuilding and conflict prevention. During the year we conducted participatory conflict analyses of the Swahili Coast regions of all three countries, we trained staff of the five project partners and 40 grassroots CSOs in peacebuilding, conflict analysis and conflict sensitivity and collaborated with three research institutions to undertake research into the opportunities for engaging young people in strengthening community peace and security, including how Swahili cultural practices can support peace and social cohesion.
Ukraine
In partnership with Institute for Peace and Common Ground we worked in four target communities to establish Dialogue Initiative Groups, which are comprised of specially trained civil society members and representatives of local authorities. These groups discussed the local consequences of the Russian invasion and brought community members together to develop solutions to identified problems. Eight community activists were trained in dialogue facilitation and 86 different individuals were directly engaged in dialogue. Radio and television broadcasts designed to raise awareness of the importance of dialogue in understanding and addressing the issues facing recently de-occupied communities reached an audience of 285,000 people.
Technical support
Engagement with the UN-led peace negotiation processes in Switzerland concerning Syria by providing capacity building support to the political opposition delegation representation in Geneva. No activities took place inside Syria.
