Saferworld Core Support 2021 - 2025

In Year 2 Saferworld has worked in 11 countries with gender and conflict sensitive peacebuilding and community security programmes: Afghanistan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Pakistan, Somaliland/Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Yemen. It has supported 221 community groups with financial resources mentoring and accompaniment to implement 1,002 community-led initiatives to address community peacebuilding and security priorities. It has worked with 117 partners of which 49 where womenled. It directly reached 15,209 people (of whom at least 53 % are women) through training and capacity builiding workhsops, mentoring, roundtables, policy discussions and other activities. Saferworld also provided 21 womenled organisations and 2 women's hubs in Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen with flexible core grants to address their own priorities. The numbers are interesting to compare with previous year's report and shows a general increase in number of community led initiatives (1,002 compared to 708 then), total number of people reached up with 3 % and higher proportion of womenled partnes (41 % now, then 33 %) and proportion of women reached in projects. This is to be viewed in a context where peacebuilding financing (Sida core grants included) has declined, but at the same time Covid restrictions have disappeared and may explain the increase in numbers despite the bleak funding for peacebuilding. A selected number of key outcomes and observations at programmatic level from this report include: •The recovery and return of stolen cattle and increased trust and interaction between communities and county and state authorities from Cueibet County in Lakes State and Tonj East County in Warrap State, South Sudan. • A formal statement from a County Commissioner proclaiming zero tolerance for revenge killings and calling for security along a key transit road in Budi County, Eastern Equatoria State, leading to dialogue and a mutual agreement between the Buya and Didinga communities for shared access to common grazing land. Since the agreement, there have been no reports of fighting, killings or livestock theft. • Provision of mental health and psychosocial support services and awarenessraising in Kyrgyzstan, South Sudan and Uganda leading to improved relationships (including between refugee and host populations), better employment prospects, increased referrals and enhanced participation in public life among participants. • The installation of CCTV in a marginalised and insecure neighbourhood of Taiz, Yemen, leading to improvements in safety and security including crime reduction and reportedly the thwarting of an assassination attempt on one of the local leaders in the area. • Improved access to medical services and education for communities in an inaccessible area of Taiz, Yemen, following a road improvement and maintenance project involving collaboration between landowners, community members and project partners. • Reported reduction in revenge killings in Sool, Somalia, following the screening on a widely watched television station of a social drama on the negative impacts of revenge killings and the importance of community safety and peaceful coexistence. • The establishment of a Sidafunded small grants facility to support partners in the global South (initially in Uganda and South Sudan) to run conflict and gender-sensitive small arms and light weapons control programmes. • Three years of additional funding secured for the Resourcing Change programme, resulting in womens rights organisations (WROs) in Yemen, South Sudan and Nigeria enjoying greater financial and operational sustainability and independence through the provision of flexible core grants, leading to greater organisational capacity, improved service delivery, and increased trust and collaboration within and between WROs and communities. • Saferworlds inputs on conflict sensitivity, meaningful engagement, and on consulting a diverse range of civil society organisations (CSOs) in a conflict and gender-sensitive manner were integrated into the EUs External Action Services new Civilian Common Security and Defence Policy Compact. • Community-level action stopped the use of toxic chemicals in traditional mining processes in the Bakori community and action prevented illegal deforestation and led to arrests in Al Rashad district, Sudan. The report is to a high extent reflecting questions that have been highlighted in previous year's report feedback and in dialogue during the year, e.g. the work with Women Rights Organisations and flexible funding, HDP Nexus, and how violent conflict prevention happened through early response by partners and recurrent examples of how local peacebuilding actors' input has been brought forward to global policy dialogue and platforms etc. Informative for the report assessment has also been the exchanges with Sida colleagues at embassy in Sudan, Kenya and Uganda, and Afghanistan unit (based in Sida HQ) as they follow up bilateral interventions with SW and have shared their impressions. When it comes to quality of the reporting, overall, this year's annual report is assessed as equally strong and to some extent even more informative than the previous year. As last year, a general observation is that there is an appropriate number of descriptive examples under each of the 5 Strategic Objectives (SO). My understanding is that SW has stepped up its tailored communications work during the year through social media and webpage, and the report gives many accounts of this as well. The analysis of Saferworld's work has also been strenghtened by important input re to outcomes, methods and relevance from embassy colleagues in Afghanistan, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda where Sida supports Saferworld in national level programs linked to peacebuilding. The highlight in terms of followup were the field trips to Kenya in January 2023 and to SE Asia (visit the Myanmar country rep in Bangkok) Sept. 2022. The visits contributed to - increased understanding of SW's work on locallyled peacebuilding and connection between natural ressource management and PB in Kenya, enhanced understanding of program priorities in Myanmar given that peace is not possible to talk about how the focus shifted towards local governance, transitional restorative justice, community security and gender equality, - this led to important openings for the followup work for Sida and crucial learnings to share with the bilateral strategy colleagues at embassies. Briefly, linked to each strategic objective the following can be mentioned: Strategic Objective 1: Inclusive peace and justice: In this period SW continued to provide trainings, accompaniment, and small and micro-grants to a wider spectrum of civil society actors, groups and organisations to with the objective that people affected by conflict have greater decisionmaking power and the resources to support their aims. The work has been implemented in most of SW programme countries such as Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan and South Sudan, Central Asia countries, Myanmar and Yemen. The work is ordered into different phases, where the first focuses on supporting identification of challenges through e.g. conflict analysis and other mapping exercises at the community level. But also at the CSO and network level where Saferworld is providing small grants to CSOs in e.g. Yemen, South Sudan and Sudan. These grants are intended to strengthen their ability to work independently, to support communityled peacebuilding initiatives, and to help ensure that civil society and communitylevel voices (particularly women and youth) are not excluded from responses to conflict. The second level is about promoting Action plans and community initiatives that promote peace and access to justice. A useful example is from Uganda where Action plans implemented by 56 Community Action groups (CAGs) in Uganda, with support from Saferworld, TPO Uganda and regional partners, addressed various types of conflict, such as humanwildlife conflicts, cattle raiding, crossborder conflicts in areas bordering South Sudan, and tensions over land ownership (including between host and refugee communities). The Sida-funded Uganda programme also supported 77 community-level dispute resolution mechanisms (DRMs) to implement action plans. This entailed working with local authorities with mandates to work on dispute resolution, including the police, area land committees, subcounty court committees, refugee welfare committees, local government, religious leaders and parish chiefs. The DRMs received training on gender and conflict sensitivity and developed a number of action plans, including to help address land conflicts, build the conflict resolution skills of land committees, and address and clarify overlaps in their mandates. The third level involves Supporting vertical and horizontal linkages and influencing authorities, important results here include the work in Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar. Lastly, the fourth level relates to direct peacebuilding results, Peaceful dispute resolution and collaboration across conflict divides: a useful example can be derived from Uganda implemented by the CAGs in cooperation with local authorities which has also contributed to immediate and tangible peacebuilding outcomes at the local level. In one example, communitylevel talking circles within and between communities in Yumbe led to the identification of conflict drivers, including conflict over land caused by the refugees need for farmland. Following dialogue sessions, host communities began to recognise land as a conflict driver as a result, some landlords began offering their land freely to refugees. Strategic Objective 2: Peoplecentred security: The objective aims to contribute to that External actors, governments, and state and nonstate security actors increasingly recognise and move away from harmful militarised and repressive approaches to conflict and security, and towards a peoplecentred and more accountable understanding of human security. One of Saferworlds core priorities under Strategic Objective 2 is arms control, which has notable overlap with Strategic Objective 4. Saferworlds work in this area includes monitoring and promoting responsible arms transfer controls and strengthening controls on small arms and light weapons (this work receives semiearmarked Sida support and is reported in another section of the report, not dealt with at depth here). A key area which this objective covers is community security, a concept that Saferworld provides training in for communities and security providers and authorities in most countries where they work. The reporting reveals both important changes in the understanding of the concept, in countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and Yemen on issues such as improved capacity to make participatory conflict analysis within communities, gender and confclit sensitive approaches involving local authorities in the analysis and in the solutions to the identified problems. Furthermore, this led to changes and improvements in security provision and the experiences of local communities of their human security (according to the outcome harvesting of SW). e.g. in Yemen where community security groups installed CCTV camera surveillance which is assessed to have prevented at least one assasination attempt and increased perceived security in the localities in Uzbekistan the community security groups reached out to repatriated families of en who had been convicted as terrorists in armed groups abroad and built trust. The community security group reached out to her and gained her trust, and started to speak with her neighbours and the wider community about the importance of tolerance and acceptance. The group ran neighbourhood seminars and events and invited her and her family to attend, and this led to the woman and her family feeling much more accepted. Important changes are also visible at the policy change level, e.g. from Myanmar. Strategic Objective 3: Transforming gender norms This aims towards that "Donors, peacebuilding organisations and policymakers, communities, civil society and authorities address gender norms and patriarchal systems and structures driving exclusion, conflict and insecurity, and promote gender equality and womens meaningful participation and leadership through their programming and policies." As in previous years, this work is crosscutting in all the SW program countries. Work at various levels for example: country level gender and conflict sensitivity analysis community action plans SW received funding for multi-country support to womens rights with core funding to support them with agency to input into peace processes under their own agendas, from which important results have been revealed during the year. SW reached 147 CBOs and community mechanisms and 188 CSOs, particularly Women Rights Organisations (WROs) and networks and around 39 authorities to support them moving from a gender sensitive to gender transformative peacebuilding practices. As well as supporting capacity change through trainings, technical support and accompaniment, Saferworld has provided core and flexible funds to womenled organisations and WROs in South Sudan and Yemen, as well as funds for organisational capacity strengthening and movement building. The support (in consortium with WILPF and Woman to woman international) that SW faciliated to WROs finished its pilot phase durign this reporting period. It revealed key findings, e.g. that: There is strong evidence that there is a multiplier effect when womenled CSOs have access to core and flexible funds. WROs in all of the contexts reported that they were able to make decisions on how, when and where to implement projects, with interventions they considered best for the context. This flexibility enabled them to fill gaps and meet needs expressed by communities that other donors were not willing to meet which in turn increased trust between WROs and the conflictaffected communities. One of the WROs supported by the project, the Kefaya Foundation in Yemen, told SW that they appreciated the flexibility in selecting our own agendas, proposals, priorities, activities and beneficiaries. The Resourcing Change funds helped us a lot with our institutional independence we feel present now, we feel more confident and free. WRO partners confirmed that the flexible and core funding has allowed them to engage in strategic institutional strengthening and strategic planning, build their internal capacities, effectively pursue their (feminist) priorities, and better respond to the contextual needs of affected communities, in particular the needs of marginalised and vulnerable women and girls. In South Sudan, Women for Change used its flexible and core funding to train staff in writing proposals, leadership and organisational management, monitoring, evaluation and learning, and effective reporting mechanisms. This resulted in the development of Women for Changes first strategic plan, a fundraising strategy and organisational policies. Strategic Objective 4: Redesigning international engagement: This objective includes SW efforts to influence global actors and donors using evidence and experience from its programmes on how shifting the power happens in practice. It covers conflict sensitivity, gender sensitivity and localisation. SW has delivered a number of help desks Sida, EU, Austrian Development Agency, UK and Conflict Sensitivity Facilities in Sudan, South Sudan and Afghanistan. The achievements reported include advocary work towards EU/EEAS on international security policies, encompasses technical advice on conflict sensitivity in China towards Chinese commercial companies and their conflict sensitivity practicies in relation to mining business for example. Some key examples (highlighted in the spotlight section) is on the role of SW to promote Peacebuidling in the HDP Nexus work in South Sudan and Sudan. Re to this, there are encouraging examples where SW's conflict advisory units have played important roles as 'critical friend' towards e.g. the World Bank and the WFP in Sudan in strengthening conflict sensitivity in its planning and humanitarian actors as well. Three positive outcomes from this work involving multilateral, government, INGO and UN actors stand out in particular, related to SW impact on agencies through its helpdesks advice: • In the summer of 2022, the European Investment Bank (EIB) launched its first ever strategic framework on conflict and fragility. This is significant as the EIB is a large-scale actor in fragile states, and this strategy represents the first time the bank has moved from project-level assessments of conflict issues to a Boardapproved organisation-wide strategy. As part of our helpdesk relationship, Saferworld and our consortium partner swisspeace had regularly recommended a more strategic approach with a greater highlevel commitment. • The Sustainable Food System and Empowered Community Alliance (made up of six NGOs) developed a conflict sensitivity tool and established a working group across the alliance to build resilient food systems in conflictaffected places, drawing on Saferworld advice and input. • Management at the World Food Programme in South Sudan invested more internal staff time in piloting organisational changes that support the uptake of conflict sensitivity. An important example to bring up is also that Saferworld has worked with others to shape the UNs approach to peacebuilding. In March 2023 Saferworld, together with Interpeace and Life & Peace Institute, hosted a consultation event in Nairobi for civil society peacebuilding organisations to input their experiences and perspectives into the UNs New Agenda for Peace process. The consultation involved several of SW civil society partners from Kyrgyzstan, Yemen and South Sudan and led to a outcome report which they submitted to the UN inter-departmental team for the New Agenda for Peace. Some of the key recommendations the report highlighted is the need to push back against the securitisation of multilateral structures and frameworks for peacebuilding massively upscale not just the quantity but also the quality of their support for local peacebuilding organisations dedicate resources for both climatesensitive peacebuilding and for conflictsensitive environmental programming, to mitigate against insecurity and violence. Strategic Objective 5: Climate, conflict and environmental degradation: This is meant to contribute to that "Communities, CSOs, authorities (local, state, national) and international actors recognise the effects of climate change on conflict dynamics collaboration between peacebuilding and environmental practitioners is strengthened and strategies to incorporate climate change and conflict prevention are developed around more holistic responses." Much of the work on this SO has been devoted to exploring how SW should work on this thematic area. But much work has also been done in relation to China through cooperation with thinktanks and companies to include climate and conflict sensitive approaches in their businesses, e.g. "While much of our work on CCED with Chinese companies and officials is still at the exploratory stage, in the reporting period we had a number of positive interactions that demonstrate a growing potential for longerterm engagement. We continued our partnership with the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF) and Shanghai Institute of International Studies (SIIS) to understand the conflict awareness and environmental, social, and governance capacity of Chinese business actors with overseas operations. In October 2022, together with SIIS and PRIF, we jointly organised a webinar entitled Environmental Security and Investment Sustainability in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This was the latest event in a series of international workshops jointly organised by the three partners since 2021, aiming to promote responsible and sustainable investment and business practices in the BRI context. At the event, through our Uganda country team, we invited Hoima Caritas Development Organisation, a local CSO partner, to share their experience engaging with Chinese business actors." Increasingly, the conflict advisory units/Conflict sensitivity helpdesks in South Sudan and Sudan have also supported organisations across the HDP Nexus to consider climate and environment into their conflict analysis. And at the country levels in programs, there are important examples from Kenya and Uganda. The Sida-funded IMARA project in Kenya aims to increase resilience to climate change-related shocks in arid and semiarid parts of the country. Elsewhere, environmental issues which impact on peace and security have been prioritised for action by community groups in Uganda and Sudan. Within the Sida Uganda-funded project, community action groups petitioned the subcounty to draft a by-law stopping charcoal burning in Nakapiripirit district. Saferworld and partners organised talking circles in November 2022 on how communities can be assisted to promote peace, security, environmental conservation and justice. Participants at the meeting raised pressing issues, including the alarming rate at which trees are being cut down for sale, fuel, brick burning and charcoal burning, and how this has exposed the land to the effects of wind and water erosion and resulted in soil degradation. Subsequently, local authorities have started a process to formulate bylaws on charcoal burning.

To contribute to prevention of violent conflict and strengthen human security, the core support from Sida will, for the period 2021-2023, contribute to the following five interlinked goals set out in Saferworld's Strategic Plan Working in solidarity for a safer world 2021-2031:  i) Inclusive peace and justice: Communities and CSOs, in particular women and youth, in conflict-affected contexts lead efforts to achieve conflict transformation and political transitions rooted in equality and justice by working with authorities and each other across conflict divides, and with relevant external actors. ii) People-centred security: External actors, governments, and state and non-state security actors increasingly recognise and move away from harmful militarised and repressive approaches to conflict and security, and towards a people-centred and more accountable understanding of human security. iii) Gender Equality: Donors, peacebuilding organisations and policymakers, communities, civil society and authorities address gender norms and patriarchal systems and structures driving exclusion, conflict and insecurity, and promote gender equality and womens meaningful participation and leadership through their programming and policies.  iv) Redesigning international engagement: International actors in conflict-affected and fragile settings realign their systems, instruments and resources to underpin peaceful change and transformation from within, putting local leadership in the driving seat. v) Climate, conflict and the environment: Communities, CSOs, authorities (local, state, national) and international actors recognise the effects of climate change on conflict dynamics; collaboration between peacebuilding and environmental practitioners is strengthened; and strategies to incorporate climate change and conflict prevention are developed around more holistic responses In addition to the core grant, Sida contribute with additional earmarked funding to expand and strengthen Saferworld's programme on arms control. The overall goal of this work is to reduce uncontrolled spread of small arms and light weapons and the effective realisation of the UN Arms Trade Treaty.