Addressing the Conditions That Produce Conflict

Conflict and insecurity push children out of school faster than almost anything else.

When families are displaced by violence, when travel to school becomes unsafe, when communities are divided along lines of ethnicity, land, or political affiliation, the first casualty is often education. Schools close. Teachers leave. Children are pulled out of the classroom by their families for their own safety, or they are kept at home because the route to school has become dangerous. Some families move to areas where there is no school for the children to attend. Others return to find that the school they left has been damaged or destroyed. By the time a conflict has subsided, a child may have lost a year or more of schooling, and many children never return.

Peace building is the work of addressing the conditions that produce conflict before conflict produces displacement, and of rebuilding the trust and cooperation that allow communities to function once a conflict has passed. In the communities where we work, this takes the form of dialogue between groups, joint problem-solving on shared resources, and support for the local mechanisms of dispute resolution that communities have used for generations. The purpose is not to impose peace from outside. It is to strengthen the capacities that communities already have, so that disputes that could become violent are resolved before they do.

Our Approach

Working with community leaders and elders

Working with Community Leaders and Elders

How it works:

  • We work with community leaders and elders. In many of the communities where conflict is a risk, the people whose voices carry weight are not the officials appointed by the state. They are the elders, the religious leaders, and the traditional authorities who have been resolving disputes in their communities for generations.
  • We work with these leaders to strengthen their capacity to intervene when a dispute is emerging, to bring parties together, and to reach agreements that hold.
  • Where the traditional mechanisms have weakened — because of displacement, because of the disruption of community structures, or because of the introduction of systems that bypass them — we work with the communities to rebuild them.

The purpose of peace building, from the perspective of a child, is that the child has a safe route to school, a school that is open and functioning, and a community that is not divided against itself. A child who is growing up in a community that has learned to manage its disputes without violence is a child who is more likely to complete her education, to remain in her home area, and to build a future in the place where she was raised. Peace building is not separate from the work of keeping children in school. It is part of the foundation on which that work rests.

A community meeting on peace building

Peace building works with community leaders, young people, women, schools, and local authorities to reduce the conditions that produce conflict, and to rebuild the trust that allows communities to function once conflict has passed.

Our commitment

Conflict and insecurity push children out of school faster than almost anything else. Peace building addresses the conditions that produce conflict before conflict produces displacement.

Join us in building peace

Help us strengthen the capacities communities already have, so that disputes that could become violent are resolved before they do. Support our campaign, volunteer your time, or partner with us to build peace across Kenya.

Every action counts—only a willingness to act is required.

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A community dialogue on peace building

Addressing the conditions

Conflict and insecurity push children out of school faster than almost anything else.