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East Africa: Preventing inter-community conflicts

This evaluation was of a three-year project working to build the capacity of minority organizations in East Africa to monitor, predict and intervene to prevent conflicts linked to access to land and water in East Africa.

The evaluator stated that the project ‘successfully tapped into the enormous energy of grass-roots community-based organizations and supported a range of small-scale activities aimed at preventing conflict and addressing inter-community tensions at the community level. This has enabled these nascent organizations to consider their particular situations, design an intervention based on some initial training in conflict management principles and then implement it, thereby practising their skills.

‘The project has excelled in much of its advocacy work with its main partners obtaining strong and extensive media coverage and amplifying the voice of minority groups. Partners have also exploited their networks of relationships with various national stakeholders, particularly in the respective governments of the three countries to good effect ensuring that messages reached the right ears.

‘Capacity-building activities outlined in the proposal were undertaken and were appreciated by participants. They were reported to have contributed to organisational strengthening of partners and to those civil society actors that have participated in the project.’

The evaluation found that there was more work to be done, and that MRG should consider focusing more to intervene on one conflict situation in more depth in a future programme and extrapolating from that one situation to make points about minority rights and conflict more generally. In addition the evaluator recommended that MRG should work to monitor the impact of advocacy work in new and improved ways and should try to generate programmes that implement recommendations in pilot or test formats rather than stopping at the point of reminding duty bearers of their responsibilities.

Download the full evaluation here.