Inclusive peacebuilding: Empowering women as agents of peace

Africa Renewal: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into peacebuilding?

Ms. Bolton: My academic background is in theology and conflict resolution. With a master’s degree in international Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and another one in Theological Studies from Emory University in Atlanta, I was driven to look at this combination of religion and conflict to see how we could use it to mobilize and capitalize on opportunities for peace in an inclusive way. It was when I was studying at Notre Dame that I first became familiar with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and learned about their work.

Catholic Relief Services is the international relief and development agency of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, founded 80 years ago during the final years of World War II. It started as War Relief Services in the 1943 and shifted in the 1950s from purely humanitarian response into doing development work, and then in the late 1990s began expanding even further into peacebuilding work.

I joined CRS 20 years ago initially and I have worked in various countries and with other organizations before coming back home to CRS. My current role is as the Technical Director for Equity, Inclusion and Peacebuilding unit. We are a team of technical advisors working globally supporting various regions and programmes in the areas of peacebuilding, governance, gender, protection and disability inclusion.

What programmes do you have in Africa?

About 80% of CRS work is in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our programmes span a wide range of sectors – education, health, agricultural livelihoods, increasingly focusing on sustainable landscapes and natural resource management in a way that is responsive to changing climate and the challenges it poses.

We also have a lot of humanitarian response to conflicts and natural disasters, and a range of women’s empowerment, gender programming and peacebuilding programmes across the continent.

Why is equity, inclusion and peacebuilding important in society today?

Thriving societies begin with social cohesion, justice, inclusion, and participation.

For sustainable development to happen, people have to be able to listen to one another, trust one another enough to come together and work together and collaborate towards their common aims, and for everyone’s voice and participation to count in that process. This is how we are approaching our work.

We have made it a priority to support people and communities to be able to address what divides them so they can find what unites them, and together, work towards transformational change.

We found this to be important because we know that the biggest challenges facing our world today – poverty, disease, climate change – are not going to be solved by individualism. They will not be solved by opposing factions, or by prioritizing one group to the exclusion of another. Problems have to be addressed collectively.

We are prioritizing integrating a social cohesion and a justice perspective across all our programmes.

Running humanitarian and development, as well as peacebuilding programming in such an integrated way is an approach that gets transformational results across all sectors.  It is operationalizing, and seeing the benefits, of working across the humanitarian development and peace nexus.

There are deep connections between the pursuit of gender equality and the pursuit of just and peaceful societies

Internal conflicts and recent coups have affected thousands of people in Africa. In your work around the continent, what have you found to be the main causes of conflict? 

We often conduct conflict analyses before we do our programmes. Some consistent themes that come up in terms of the causes of conflict have to do with: –

• Marginalization, especially in a context of grinding poverty where it is hard to find hope.
• Exclusion, particularly for young people, minority groups or those that might be either underrepresented, or minority groups. 
• Lack of trust. That is an important factor in being able to improve relationships, not just across different groups who may distrust each other, but trust between citizens and those in authority at all levels of society.

• Accountability in governance is a key issue as well.

These were some of the key findings that came up in an initial conflict analysis in 2019-2020, at the start of the Sahel Peace Initiative we have been advancing with religious leaders across Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. In response to these issues, we have been supporting those leaders’ work and advocacy for more sustainable and holistic responses to the crisis in the Sahel.