5) Description of initiative: The process of building peace in communities and areas affected by the war and violence and reconciliation and healing from the suffering and trauma it has created are challenging tasks. Peace cannot be imposed or decreed from above. Even after violence has ended, the underlying dynamics and structures – the root causes – which gave rise to the violence in the first place, and the visible and invisible effects of that violence on the community, may still remain. The impacts of violence upon the marginalized, the poor, women, children, rural communities, the elderly and workers – including social, political, economic, psychological, health and other repercussions – are frequently overlooked and neglected as political leaders and elites come together with fine sounding words for peace. This project intends to provide practical resource though training for individuals, organizations, government, youths, social mobilizers, as well as armed forces and Maoists, working to empower themselves, individuals and communities for grass-roots, people-centered peacebuilding initiatives at the local, and national levels. Most importantly, it is a program for people struggling to overcome the impacts of war on their communities, to develop the resources and capacities to transform conflicts constructively, and to prevent the recurrence of violence. As such, it is based upon the recognition that there are initiatives and actions which can be taken to promote peace, constructive transformation of conflicts, and healing in war and violence affected communities by groups, organizations and individuals – including women, men, youth, elderly, farmers, social organizers, workers, political leaders, journalists, civil servants, community leaders, teachers and others – at every possible level and from every possible sector in the country.

6) Description of innovation: Peace initiatives in Nepal have often focused upon top level political and military leaders, excluding the vast majority of social actors and those who can contribute to (i) transforming the conflict(s), (ii) bringing an end to the violence (including both the creation of local and national level cease-fires), (iii) addressing its root causes, (iv) healing from the violence and destruction of the war, and (v) building resources and institutions for peace in the country/community. So mobilization of broad social involvement and pressure for peace, as well as the development of peacebuilding processes by local communities and actors across the country, and support for local capacities and resources for peace are essential if the paralyzing dynamics of war and confrontation are to be transcended. While significant investments are made in training soldiers to kill, including purchasing of weapons, military training programs, and actual combat – by the combatants, the Nepali State, and foreign countries – very little is done to prepare, empower and strengthen people for active peace work. In order to overcome the war it will be necessary to encourage & strengthen individuals and communities across the country to be able to actively resist the spread of violence, to transform conflicts constructively, to regenerate community in areas devastated by war, and to build a concrete vision of what they want, addressing and transcending the root causes of the war. In addition, developing institutions, networks, and structures which can support peacebuilding and peace work at the community and national levels are essential. So we will focus on providing various training model which are necessary to prepare organizations, policy makers and peace workers for post conflict reconstruction and recovery phases in Nepal. So it is unique in the way that we are empowering grassroots peacebuilding initiatives by creating a culture of peace through bottom up approach.

7) Delivery model: We believes that training programs for conflict transformation & peacebuilding should not be one-off events, but should be linked to broader programs aimed at empowering and strengthening individuals and local communities’ capacity for responding to conflicts and peacebuilding. Training should be needs-based, and highly interactive and participatory, responding to the concrete challenges and issues facing participants, building upon their own knowledge & experience, and integrating the content of the training into their real lives & situations. Thus the content of the training is specifically designed for the context in which the program is taking place and the needs, skills and qualities of the participants taking part. We emphasize that trainers and peace workers should be able to interact with & respond to the context, needs & situation of each area and/or group they are working with, building also upon local knowledge, culture and traditions, and addressing the real needs and immediate and long-term realities of participants. As far as possible we use the local trainers and resource persons, involving them in the development of training so that this can gradually lead to the development of a network of trainers and peace workers cooperating across districts and nationally to build and strengthen resources and forces for peace. We have identified the grassroots organizations and their needs as we recently conducted a documentation identifying grassroots peacebuilding initiatives and organizations. So we have started designing localized training modules and start delivering it to our target groups. We are also concentrating more on developing local trainers so that he/she can replicate it to his/her community. Similarly we have started supporting these grassroots initiatives with resources linking them with donors and government organizations. We are now launching the database in the internet and publishing a directory of these initiatives and organizations.

8) Key operational partnerships: We have identified most of the grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, organizations & individuals and prepared a database. We are also publishing it as a directory and working to put these initiatives in internet for wide circulation as we believe the people who run these initiatives and their organizations are the untapped resource which could make a major difference to the security of the world’s people over the next twenty years particularly in low profile conflicts within rather than between countries. Local peacebuilding initiatives are barely mentioned in government policies towards preventing or managing conflict. We believe that this is not because they are considered unimportant rather that they are effectively invisible from the standpoint of government and indeed the media. So we are partnered with UK Based organization PEACE DIRECT on this direction and we are in a process to list all these initiatives in their project known as Insights of Conflict (www.insightonconflict.org). Similarly for the delivery of training programs we have partnered with UK based Center for International Peacebuilding, TRANSCEND, Nepalese Government & all our benificiaries of the project. These partnerships are really supporting us & playing crucial roles for us for our further progress. These partnerships help us to secure resources such as funds, trainers & opportunity to share & learn from their experiences.

9) Financial model: We ourself reach to these organizations as we are constantly documenting community and grassroots peacebuilding initiatives. So we ascertain their challenges and obstacles and try to meet these challenges providing them trainings to build their capacity and highlight their initiatives in media and expose it to donors and international organizations so that they have access to further support and resources. When we are conducting any activity in the community we use local media so in many cases they themselves have requested us for the support. Since we are focused in creating local resource person and trainers so they go back to their communities and they train more of these organizations and individuals. So this way we plan to reach all over Nepal and in all communities.

          • Costs as percentage of income: -

          • Financing: In respect to our financial capacity, we do have some support from our partner organizations such as The Carter Center, Centre for International Peacebuilding, Transcend & Peace Direct. We are trying our best to secure a major funding to this program so that we can support all these grassroots initiatives in Nepal and establish a local peace builder’s network all over Nepal and similarly replicate this success to other countries in the world. We need funding for the initial stage till we develop a local network of peace builders and local training modules. After achieving that stage the program will sustain itself as most of the communities have their own local resources and they can share and learn in this network we plan to establish.

10) Effectiveness

          • Project outcomes: Till now we have documented the grassroots peacebuilding initiatives and we have maintained the database of the peace workers and organizations and identified challenges in their work. So now we are trying to overcome their challenges by providing with capacity building trainings and trainings related to different aspect peacebuilding & conflict transformation. We have conducted one training program in Oct, 2006 and several other are in pipeline. In the mean time we are partnered with Peace Direct to acquire more support in our work and list these initiatives in Insight of Conflict database (www.insightonconflict.org). We are working with our partners to provide more support to them. Till date we have served more than 200 organizations of different communities of Nepal.

          • Number of clients in past year: We have served more than 200 organizations directly and since we emphasize on replicating what they learnt from us to their community so indirectly we have served more than 100,000 people of Nepal in more than 10 communities across Nepal. Now these initiatives are also listed in Insight of Conflict website so donors and international organizations can now directly support these initiatives.

11) Scaling up strategy

          • Stage of the initiative: Scaling Up stage.

          • Expansion plan: Our target is reaching all the communities with next year and in three years we want to reach to other communities of South Asia linking all these grassroots peacebuilding initiatives so that they can learn and share from each others experiences. Peace work is a very challenging work. It needs a lot of experience and a lot of courage to deal with issues of conflict and its complexity has rooted in religion, economics, cultures etc which is barriers of peace buildings. So we want to create a bridge to overcome these barriers and share, & learn and from other communities so that we can encourage more people to involve in peacebuilding and sustain peace in the community by bringing in harmony and respect for everybody. We are already in that direction partnering our initiatives with Peace Direct so as we can share and learn from other communities which has different cultures and religion

12) Origin of the initiative: I got this inspiration to support these grassroots peacebuilding from two things. 1st I spend my teenage in the shadow of civil war in Nepal & I have personally experienced how much it is necessary that peace work should be bottom up not top down. And 2nd during my Masters in Peace Studies, grassroots level work have never been mentioned by any of my professors. So I was always debating in my class why they don’t consider Mr X work to heal trauma in his society better than World Bank’s reconstruction work in Rwanda. So I came to conclusion that in every conflict there are local people working for peace. Their skills & experiences are crucial to understanding and resolving conflict, but their stories are seldom heard & their knowledge rarely utilized. So I decided to work towards supporting these initiatives and making my point that it is far more effective process in peacebuilding.

Contact Information:
Manish  Thapa
Executive Director
Asian Study Center for Peace & Conflict Transformation (ASPECT)
(NGO - Research & Training Center)
manish_thapa@hotmail.com
Nepal
Tel: 00977 01 4434870
Fax: 00977 01 4442557
Email: manish_thapa@hotmail.com
Website: www.aspectasia.org