Submission

Central Peace Working Committee

Conflict Mitigation and Resolution in Niger Delta

Charles Abani
Lydia Odeh
Jennifer Onyejekwe
Monica Emosairue

Chief of Party
Deputy Chief of Party
Public Awareness and Communications Advisor
Niger Delta Advisor

cabani@nigeriasace.org
lodeh@nigeriasace.org
Jonyejekwe@nigeriasace.org
Memosairue@nigeriasace.org

West Africa and Haiti

Strengthening Advocacy and Civic Engagement Project

Democracy and Governance

Insecurity and violence have undermined economic development for communities in the Niger Delta. This is as a result of years of Oil exploration activities leading to the devastation of the environment, depletion of the ecosystem, loss of primary occupation and means of livelihood of the people.

The long years of neglect of the region by successive governments has brewed high levels of frustration, anger, violence and militancy. Several peace actors and development practitioner have carried out various studies and interventions in the region aimed at finding lasting solutions to the conflict issues therein. Despite concerted efforts by these actor and government, peace in the region have remained elusive.

The Nembe City Development Foundation (NCDF), a SACE project partner, believe that the level of insecurity would be reduced in the region if there were planned efforts that build on existing peace structures to provide a coordinated inclusive conflict resolutions system.

The Strengthening Advocacy and Civic Engagement (SACE) project objective is to strengthen civil society’s ability to influence the development and implementation of key democratic reforms at the national, state, and local levels. The project supports increased engagement and efficacy of civil society to influence public institutions whose function it is to serve citizens’ interests. To achieve this, the project builds capacity, strengthen engagement and promote greater public awareness with the view to really bringing about sustained and positive change.Our building capacity focus is on high-end skills (what we call 2.0 skills) using our unique STAR methodology with a focus on capacity that yields results.

The Project supports 15 clusters which has a combined number of over 80 civil society organisations which influence the adoption, repeal, introduction or amendments of policies in Nigeria. NCDF is an anchor organisation for one of the clusters called Peace Advocacy Cluster.

Central Peace Working Committee

Nigeria

Other

October 2015 till date

The Central Peace Working Committee (CPWC) is an innovative approach to address conflict challenges in conflict prone communities. The CPWC is made up of community members, security operatives and government executives from the different 12 Local Government Areas (LGA) in Bayelsa State, Nigeria. The CPWC is an independent committee which meets monthly to review the interim reports from the communities and recommend appropriate interventions/actions of the reports received from the community-based peace champions. The community peace champions act as whistle blowers and they feed the CPWC with information on potential crisis situations. CPWC leverages on the Integrated Peace and Development Unit (IPDU) which is an SMS platform developed by the Partners for Peace (P4P) to anonymously receive conflict information from community peace agents trained by NCDF for the purpose. Information via the IPDU is shared with the CPWC as the offline body to address conflict resolution

The main goal of the CPWC is to build empowered community systems for inclusive economic growth through conflict prevention and peace initiatives. The CPWC is composed of community leaders, government representatives, security agencies and the press in ensuring sustainable peace and inclusive economic growth. The potential outcome is for various community members to create a robust information network that will engage with government and security agencies, share information with the CPWC and ultimately ensure sustainable peace.
It is expected that an increased number of conflict incidence reports and targeted interventions in these communities will invariably lead to decrease in escalated conflict. It is also expected that the state security force will use reports by the CPWC as an integral part of the monthly state security briefs.

The initial challenge was in acceptance of the CPWC as independent mediators for conflict resolutions. The Community dwellers were scared of reporting conflict incidents and its fallout repercussions. Another challenge was to get security operatives to delegate senior officers to be part of the CPWC.

With consistent advocacy of key stakeholders and training of peace champions as whistle blowers the project slowly picked up in momentum. With evidence based conflict resolutions it built trust

The CPWC approach is not project specific and can be replicated and used by other projects around peace building.