This is the second in a series of guest blogs written by current VCD student. This week Shiori Ueki asks...
Since 2017, Japanesenon-governmental organization has started a
peacebuilding programme through sports in the northern part of Uganda where
many refugees from South Sudan live. The programme aims at preventing conflicts
by intercultural understanding between Ugandan people and refugees playing
football together. In other words, teamwork
and interculturalunderstanding play an important role for peacebuilding. At the
same time, to prevent recurrence of conflicts it’s important to create job
opportunities for people who are the victims of conflicts because of the relationshipbetween economic development and conflict. In this
blog, I argue that peacebuilding approaches by intercultural understanding and
creating employment impact people differently comparing two cases.
Peacebuilding in
South Sudan by NGO
JapanCenter for Conflict Prevention (JCCP), an
international NGO, runs the conflict management projects aimed at strengthening
community resilience by training young leaders as intermediaries and by
expanding ethnic harmonization through vegetable growing activities within
opposing communities.
JCCP
has started the project In Juba, South Sudan in 2016, which targets youth in
opposing communities especially who are going to be the leaders for next
generation. There is the tension between the indigenous people and the people
from the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps which provide people who are
forced to flee from his/her home but still remain within their home country to
stay safe. JCCP is running conflict management programmes for both communities
to resolve the emerging conflicts inside and outside of the IDP camps. This
programme intends to train youth to be intermediaries who would be inspiring
community members rather than educating random individuals, resulting in exponentially
improving the awareness of understanding the backbone of cultural differences
in the future. The selected participants learn a competence to manage ongoing
community conflicts through leadership training programme and subsequently
immerse themselves in dealing with opposing ethnic groups including outside of
the leadership programme by cooperating vegetable growing activities. Through
this initiative, people can promote not only mutual understanding but learning
the way of processing foods for preserving it longer or cooking easily which
contributes to overcome the seasonal issues with serious shortage of food.
Training future leaders, learning methods to manage
conflicts and other things without violence or co-working with different ethnic
groups' people play an important role to prevent and reduce conflicts within
and outside of the community.
Peacebuilding
through business in Bosnia
BHcrafts, an enterprise
in Bosnia, runs a business of handmade crafts by women from Bosnia and
Herzegovina to improve both their lives and their families while also conducting
a programme for training the youth to run business with cultural heritage.
BHcrafts is an enterprise which started after the
highly destructive Bosnian War in 1995, it employed more than 500 women from
Bosnia and Herzegovina who became victims of the war and lost their families or
homes. BHcrafts decided to give these women opportunities to move forward by generating
employment for them. This project contributes to helping women’s past and
intercultural understanding between people in opposing sides by working
together.
BHcrafts has also implemented 'Youth In Crafts' programme
for 8 months since August 2018, targeting around 60 people aged 17 to 23 in
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through workshops, the youths can learn about social
entrepreneurship on BHcrafts model, about filming videos to preserve cultural
heritage and about their country's cultural heritage that can be economic
resource. This programme's goal is to engage the youths in BHcrafts business.
Through this programme, the young will be active, create self-employment
opportunities, utilise cultural heritage as economic resource and preserve it
for the future generations.
Let’s compare
these cases.
The
common thing is that they both make products with an aim to combat conflicts in
the communities by cooperating activities. But they have 3 differences; whether
they sell the products or not, the scale of impact and the requirements to
implement the programme in Table 1.
Firstly, JCCP does not generate revenue from the products
that participants make during the programme so they might lose job
opportunities. On the contrary, BHcrafts generates profits and contributes to
provide the job opportunities. According to World
Development Report 2011, unemployment is one of
the key factors that causes violent conflicts. The Bhcrafts' project therefore
would contribute to conflict prevention as it offers job opportunities to
people.
Secondly, the type of approach to prevent the
conflicts is different. The impact of the JCCP programme can be measured by the
increased number of the people who understand and accept opposing culture or
perspective via training leaders, which would be exponentially expanding
illustrated in Figure 1. This is because training leaders acts as influencers
raising awareness in the communities. People around the leaders learn how to response
to conflicts from their behaviors and even eventually admire their attitudes. In
contrast, BHcrafts focuses on promoting the employees’ intercultural
understanding rather than educating people across communities. People who can
understand the cultural difference might be confined within the employees in
Figure 2.
Figure
1: Impacts given by JCCP programme by author
Figure
2: impacts given by BHcrafts programme by author
Thirdly, what they need to implement the programme is
different. JCCP programme needs to incentivise people to participate in the
programme without salary. In other words, participants are required to be able
to afford for their living expenditure during the programme. In contrast, the
Bhcrafts creates job opportunities for the local under the condition that needs
the established eco-system where company can run their business with
sustainability in the country, for instance, accessibility to financial
resources, labor force, material resources that would help them generate the
profits.
Conclusion
Taking two cases as examples of peacebuilding by intercultural
understanding there are many differences between the NGO and the enterprise.
NGO projects do not create job opportunities, but it can exponentially improve an
awareness. In contrast, enterprise might confine the number of participating people,
however, they give job opportunities and contribute to the country's economy.
If you are the practitioner aiming at prevailing in intercultural understanding,
which would you like to choose, or to prefer hybrid?
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