PEACEBUILDING IN THE NIGER DELTA

PROGRAM OVERVIEW:

The strategic thrust of the peace building program is to achieve regional and lasting peace in the Niger Delta. To achieve this, PIND is creating sustainable peace partnerships, encouraging collaboration and cooperation amongst peace actors, providing support for economic development, and strengthening indigenous structures for peace, while also creating and building interfaces with larger state-level or regional peace efforts; thereby creating an enabling environment for sustainable broad-based economic development.

The peace building program consists of two interrelated and interdependent projects: The Integrated Peace and Development Unit (IPDU) and Partners for Peace (P4P) Network. The IPDU focuses on undertaking research and providing training to local and international stakeholders to implement innovative pilot projects that show promise of making a difference on the ground. Responding quickly in a targeted manner to rapidly changing dynamics, IPDU promotes collaboration and synergy amongst existing local, regional, and national efforts of actors in both public and private sectors to develop/deploy early warning and response mechanisms to address conflict, with a focus on gender and youth.

The P4P Network is PIND’s strategy towards establishing social infrastructure and capital across all nine States of the Niger Delta. In the last five years, PIND has established a network of self-identified agents of peace that have deployed the power of grassroots networking towards building peace in the region. Using conflict analyses and early warning as key instruments, P4P identifies, and supports existing initiatives, and creates new ones to address the conflict risk factors. The P4P Network currently has chapters and subchapters in all the 9 States and 119 LGAs of the Niger Delta.

In the current strategic phase, the Peace Network will focus on establishing and strengthening grassroots conflict resolution initiatives that promote a more enabling, integrated, and peaceable environment conducive for economic growth and development in the region.

RECENT UPDATES

STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES: 2020 – 2024

Overaching Aim

Strengthen conflict management systems and capacities for enabling peace & economic growth, utilizing analysis & advocacy to address constraints to peace. Enable active engagement of 5,000 peace actors in conflict mitigation and reduction and positively affect up to 3 million individuals with peace building interventions

Programmatic Objectives

  • Build Capacity of Peacebuilding Actors

  • Improve the understanding of the dynamics, trends and causes of the Niger Delta conflict among national and international stakeholders.

  • Promote synergy and cooperation among actors in the region

  • Catalyze and facilitate the carrying out of interventions by various stakeholders to address conflict and violence in the Niger Delta

Approach

  • Early Warning: Data collection and analysis will inform everything that is done across the program area.

  • Partnership/Business Development: Program will cultivate peace and security ecosystem that creates added value (greater than sum of its parts).

  • Network support & Small Grants: to provide targeted support to the P4P Network where data indicates a priority, emphasize strengthening the institutional capacity of the P4P network and administrative Secretariat to enhance sustainability of the network and use small grants to fill critical gaps that may exist, despite the presence of the P4P Network and the wider collective of peace and security actors in the region

  • Center of Excellence: This will provide technical services and trainings to private and public sector actors in the region for a fee

SUCCESS STORIES