Reflecting on four years of peacebuilding in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania

The “Kujenga Amani: Building peace and the Swahili Coast” project officially ended this past May. The project, which started in 2023 under the leadership of CEFA Onlus (now Terra Aperta) and with financial support from the European Union, was, for AP, an important opportunity to grow.

It represented a large grant for the organisation at the time, and it committed us to work in a new partnership and in at least one new geographical context. It forced us to evolve and allowed us to generate—from what we did and from what all the partners under the project did—a lot of learning. This came continuously over the years of implementation, and we adapted each time we identified useful insights from our experience.

With the project now over, it is good to take stock and turn the spotlight on some of the most relevant lessons we learned and are now carrying forward.

Let’s start with what the project was and what it did.
Kujenga Amani was launched with the aim of strengthening the involvement of young people, and especially young women, in the promotion of dialogue and peacebuilding in Kenya (specifically in the counties of Kwale and Mombasa), Mozambique (the Cabo Delgado province) and Tanzania (the Mtwara and Tanga regions). The project featured a diverse consortium: under the lead of CEFA Onlus, there were national partners that led activities in each country, including Muslim Women Advancement for Rights and Protection (MWARP) and SambaSports Youth Agenda in Kenya, Muleide in Mozambique and Global Religion for Children Foundation (GRFC) in Tanzania. AP was the technical partner, mandated to ensure that the consortium had the necessary knowledge and skills to undertake all planned peacebuilding activities.

For this reason, we started by conducting a conflict analysis and a training of trainers for staff from all the consortium members. Partners then started implementing a number of activities. They collaborated and launched peace caravans—large public events to bring people together and talk about the need for peace. They established and supported Peace Clubs in primary and secondary schools. They organised football tournaments, around which they built moments for young people—and young women in particular—to come together and talk about the problems in their communities and how they could solve them together. As AP we also organised training workshops where media representatives could learn how to report on conflict, in an effort to change the perceptions feeding youth exclusion. Then, in the last year, Kujenga Amani made available grants for smaller, usually grassroots organisations, to implement their own projects, which focused on mobilising young people, building trust and addressing specific problems like gender-based violence (GBV).

It was an extremely rich experience that, through ongoing monitoring and evaluation, was translated into analysis and insights, then into lessons learned. With the project now completed, it is worth mentioning some of the most important among these.

The first important lesson learned is about the positive pay-off of locally-led development. LLD—an approach that that seeks to shift decision-making power and financial resources to the people closest to the issues being addressed—has been around for a while, but its uptake has been slow. Kujenga Amani managed to integrate it, more specifically in its sub-granting scheme. This allowed CEFA to make financial resources available to a total of 19 civil society organisations in addition to the national partners. Not only that: CEFA also allowed these organisations a measure of autonomy in selecting and implementing their initiatives, leading to many positive results. In Kenya’s Kwale County, for example, one of the sub-grantees, HUDA, trained around 20 GBV survivors in trauma healing and these women eventually formed a network that is expanding access to trauma healing services across the county. These results could not have been possible had it not been for Kujenga Amani’s willingness to share resources, as well as a measure of decision-making, with smaller, but much deeply rooted, organisations.

The second lesson learned is about the production and use of knowledge. AP’s first activity under the project was a conflict analysis, which is a relatively standard endeavour (and a good practice) within peacebuilding projects. Two decisions, however, helped to make this activity more useful than originally planned.

First, the research was conducted in the specific locations. Rather than producing a national analysis, data was collected at the level of sub-counties and wards (Kenya) and districts (in Mozambique and Tanzania). The end result was a very granular assessment of what young people saw as the biggest drivers of conflict where they lived.

Secondly, the research was used informally. It was published, but it was also used as the basis for reflection and planning in the context of the informal exchanges taking place between (and sometimes also within) partner organisations. The combination of the local focus of the research and the emphasis on its informal use helped to elevate what is sometimes referred to as “tacit knowledge”—i.e., the unwritten, practical know-how, cultural intuition, and expert insight that is generated through lived experience rather than formal studies. And this in turn helped the project to navigate cultural and political sensitivities while remaining focused on its goal.

Finally, the third and last lesson learned is about partnerships. Here what is valuable to highlight is that the project was not successful because of the already-existing relations that existed between the partners. It was successful because it allowed these relations to evolve.

From AP’s side, for instance, we grew our collaboration with CEFA/ Terra Aperta, adapting the Kujenga Amani model in Somalia and securing another EU grant to start implementation in that country (the project, which is ongoing, is called BRIDGES). Perhaps the most important example is the collaboration between AP and MWARP, which actually started with Kujenga Amani. Thanks to the project, our two organisations were able to start an exchange that eventually led to the design of a regional project to support women mediators and peacebuilders across the Horn of Africa region. That project has now been funded through two cycles, and has expanded the reach of both what we as AP and MWARP have been able to do in support of women empowerment.

These lessons learned, and the overall experience of Kujenga Amani, are valuable for one more reason. At a time of steep funding cuts to aid, what has been achieved through the project represents, in fact, a strong reminder of the impact that well-constructed, partnership-driven initiatives can have.

Through Kujenga Amani, we were able to temporarily overcome challenges that had been constraining our work, while also expanding the benefits of peacebuilding efforts to hundreds of people. The dividends have been concrete and visible in the number of people reached, the increase in confidence of those who attended the many training and dialogue events organised under the project, and the partnerships that were borne from the project.

More importantly, impact is evident in the level of trust that the project was able to cultivate, in specific locations, in spite of the political turmoil witnessed in Kenya, for example, with the so-called Gen Z protests. This trust remains there, ready to be cultivated by a new generation of initiatives. Donors should take note.