Peacebuilding & Social Cohesion
Deris Wanaag
Seven months on the Dollo Ado–Dollo Bay corridor, connecting two things that are usually funded separately: keeping the peace between clans, and giving marginalised women and young people a business of their own.
Project at a glance
Seven months, every activity completed
All seven tracked activities closed at 100%. Two of them reached double their target.
People reached — 315 women, 215 men
Participants in cross-border dialogue, against a target of 60
Women’s and youth groups given business grants
People reached through GBV and women’s rights campaigns
The approach
Peace and a livelihood are the same problem
The project set out to strengthen both the formal and the informal mechanisms that hold communities together along the Dollo Ado and Dollo Bay corridor.
Border areas here are unstable for reasons that are economic as much as political. A young person with no income and no standing in the community is exposed to whoever offers both. A clan dispute over a waterpoint is also a dispute about who eats this year.
So Deris Wanaag worked on both sides at once: it built the capacity of local authorities, clan leaders and cross-border peace committees to mediate, and at the same time put working capital and business skills into the hands of women and young people who had been left out. Traditional peace structures and modern financial inclusion, run as one programme rather than two.
What we did
- An inception and grassroots sensitisation meeting with 40 participants, to secure community buy-in before anything else started
- Conflict resolution and mediation training for 60 local authorities, community leaders and cross-border peace committee members, focused specifically on gender and clan dynamics
- Two rounds of cross-border community dialogue, reaching 120 participants against a target of 60
- Awareness campaigns challenging harmful gender norms and promoting women’s rights, run in both woredas with 50 participants
- Business grants to 10 marginalised women’s and youth groups — five in each woreda — totalling ETB 1,142,995.30, funding salons, tailoring workshops, cafés, shops, fish selling and sports equipment enterprises
- Entrepreneurship and financial literacy training for 50 people, split evenly between the two woredas
- Refresher coaching and mentorship in financial literacy and group dynamics for 120 members of the granted groups, against a target of 60
- International Women’s Day celebrations in both woredas with the Women and Youth Affairs Office, reaching 140 women and girls
- A 16 Days of Activism campaign reaching 43 women and girls, with the Women Affairs Office and health sector co-leading door-to-door and town-wide awareness work
- A mapping assessment to identify eligible groups, and a workshop on the findings
Results
What changed
Inter-clan trust, rebuilt
The dialogues revived trust between clans and produced resource-sharing agreements. Woreda peace offices recognised the traditional mediation practices documented through the project as valuable for sustaining peace.
Ten businesses, actually trading
ETB 114,299.53 to each of ten groups, in enterprises the groups chose themselves — salons, tailoring, cafés, shops, fish selling, sports equipment — backed by training and follow-up mentoring rather than a one-off cash drop.
Men and boys in the conversation
Participants reported better understanding of women’s rights and social inclusion, less tolerance of gender-based violence, and more willingness among men and boys to back equality work.
Double the dialogue we planned for
Both the cross-border dialogue and the refresher mentorship reached 120 people against targets of 60 — demand was higher than the design assumed.
What we learned
Honest notes from a short project
What worked. Working through the woreda administration was a strength, not an obstacle — roles were clear and relationships held. Community consultation before implementation is what kept the peace work credible. Group dynamics and leadership structures inside the women’s and youth groups were established properly, and every activity ran on schedule. Planning as a group let us map conflict-prone areas, causes and mediation routes together rather than from an office.
What was harder. The need in these communities is far larger than a seven-month grant can meet. Terrorist actors on the Somalia borderline continue to act as both pull and push factors on youth radicalisation, which undercuts cross-border youth solidarity. Our geographic coverage was limited, particularly in the Afder Zone. The administration and the peace and security office had no back-up resources for monitoring the security situation. Inflation kept eroding what the grants could buy. And granting to groups is a slow process — a lot of process, conditions and discussion before money moves.
Where we would take it next. Mass awareness work to stop young people joining armed groups; resources for the administration and peace offices to cover coordination, logistics and communication; expansion along the cross-border areas; rapid security and needs assessment; vulnerability mapping and market analysis; co-creation workshops with women and youth; and grants to individual marginalised women and young people, not only to groups.
A model worth running longer than seven months
Deris Wanaag showed that peace committees and business grants reinforce each other. Talk to us about scaling it across the border corridor.