About Us

About the project

We are developing a new way to address conflict that enlists children in rural Africa through a collaboration of local peace ambassadors, families and communities with academics from Kenya, Cameroon and Ethiopia.

One of the perennial concerns of human beings is the need for peace, prosperity, and harmony in society, where people can truly live out their potential. New social trends have faded the indigenous ways of seeking peace amid conflict; such ways could support peaceful conflict resolution among children and adolescents who represent the future of humanity. Following these issues our project will investigate how forgiveness and reconciliation rituals can be useful in helping children and adolescents from Kenyan Turkana, Ethiopian Amhara and Cameroonian Grassland communities to embrace peaceful conflict resolution processes.  We aim to answer three questions that flow one into another; 1. What are the mechanisms of depolarizations present in indigenous African forgiveness and reconciliation rituals? 2. What child and adolescent focused mechanisms of depolarization in these rituals can be adapted to modify an already existing African nation’s model of peaceful conflict resolution? 3. Do children and adolescents who participate in these rituals embrace peaceful conflict resolution processes?  We will hold dissemination workshops with stakeholders and adolescents that took part in the study. We plan that our findings be included in policy briefs and curricula that promote indigenous conflict resolution efforts in Kenya and Globally.  We will apply the indigenous African philosophy of Ubuntu to shed light on the psychological, spiritual and developmental value of forgiveness and reconciliation rituals and also promote global north-global south learning in relation to sustainable conflict resolution starting at childhood onwards.

What we are doing

Phase 1

We recognize the importance of stakeholders in developing a sustainable peace model. We will therefore:

  1. Use participatory methods to identify 20 focal persons, individually and in organizations, with experience in conflict resolution, Influence and  interest in our intervention. These people will include at least 10 children and adolescents; being the primary target of our project.
  2. Select 7 members from this stakeholder group to form our project advisory board
  3. Plan to meet and present project updates to these board members on project months 4, 12, 20, 24

 

We have successfully held an initial Theory of Change (ToC) workshop with stakeholders in Kenya. Cameroon and Ethiopia sites will hold their ToC workshops in January 2024.

Phase 2:

With the already identified stakeholders, we will conduct 1 to 11/2 long Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with gender and age-group disaggregated  groups that makes a total of 4 group discussions. We will also conduct 45 minutes to hour long Key informant interviews with 4 individuals nominated by fellow stakeholders I the three sites.

In both these discussions and interviews we will collect participants’ experiences of participating in forgiveness and reconciliation rituals; the ritual process, who participated, individual participant role in the ritual, benefits of the rituals to individuals and community and how they felt about their perceived ’enemies’ after the process. The information we collect will enable us to modify the Rwanda peace model to fit the adolescent model of depolarization. We will work through a co-development process with local community stakeholders and adolescent end users.

Phase 3:

we will collect demographic information then administer 2 Psychometric Tests to a total of 500 children and adolescents aged 10-18 years in each of the three sites. Participant groups will include characteristics such as school and non-school going, girls and boys and half of the recruited participants will make up control groups and will not take part in the 5 day intervention activities but only take the psychometric tests (adapted and contextualized Extremism  Ozer & Bertelsen (2018) and Prosociallness Scale for Adults,  (Caprara et al. 2005) .

Our hypothesis is that participation in forgiveness and reconciliation rituals improve children and adolescents’ propensity to embrace peaceful conflict resolution processes.