Africa: Building Peace From the Ground Up

Nairobi — With peace agreements ending wars across Africa, thousands of local communities have in recent years embarked on the long road of rebuilding and revival. The course is daunting: not only to generate productive livelihoods in difficult economic times, but also to avoid new eruptions of violence.

African civil organizations are especially well placed for such efforts, notes Chukwuemeka Eze, programme director of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), a regional civil society group headquartered in Accra, Ghana. That is because they often have much closer links to local communities than do either national governments or international agencies. "The best and most sustainable peacebuilding process should be locally generated, and externally supported," he told Africa Renewal. While the United Nations and other external institutions certainly can be helpful, Mr. Eze adds, programmes to consolidate peace must be "driven by African civil society organizations," in close collaboration with African governments and regional organizations.

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