Peace is a much talked about agenda in almost the entire world. There is a need for peace in almost every society, every organization and in every person.

In society, the absence of development remains among the major structural causes of persistent conflicts and lack of peace.

Recently, a week long process at the Melanesian Institute (MI) in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province where 10 participants from Southern Highlands province and 10 from Hela to make into reality the Grassroots Peacebuilders Action Team (GPAT) for each of their province.

The process was facilitated by MI’s Head of Research and the UN Women funded GYPI project technical consultant Fr. Joel Bernardo.  

Working with grassroots communities as a strategic option, MI took on an emerging call for a collaborative project to strengthen the women and youth sectors in the Southern Highlands and Hela Provinces in managing conflicts, promoting Peace and creating enabling environment for relevant development under the Gender and Youth Peace Initiative (GYPI).

Peacebuilding and security remain to be core agendas that cut across the Institute’s growing works and networks in Melanesian knowledge production of social researches and education courses.

What’s unique about the GYPI project is that it invests on identifying and building up the grassroots peace building capacities, in particular, gender, generational and grassroots.

It uses participatory processes such as social mapping and conflict analysis tools rather than prescribe solutions or replicate models from other contexts on peace building.

One of the key processes that were put into action in the week was the consolidation of grassroots database. This included each province’s evidence of social mapping, cultural audit and conflict analyses in their province.

Another process that was put into practice was the reflection, synthesis and implications in context of covid-19 pandemic and the African Swine Fever from what they learnt in the field during the GYPI project.

Also shared were prospects for roll-out to other communities and participatory designing and planning for the second phase of the project.

This included personally created key messages and original marketing strategies used by the participants to market their key messages.

The five topic areas which their messaging and marketing were based on were; peace and gender, peace and young generation, peace and social inclusion, peace and culture and peace.

Unlike other processes held in previous times, UN Women rep and Gender program analyst James Neo was present to witness firsthand the remaining two days of the process.

With the institute upholding social inclusion and the representation and involvement of vulnerable/marginalized sectors, the project and process also featured visually impaired Noah Kunz Boli from Ialibu Southern Highlands.

“Previously we do things short cut and do not follow right procedures of bringing peace into any problem but after the first and second module of the project and this process, I’ve come to realize that I must start from point one to the end and not make any short cuts to ensure that peace lasts and is not temporary.”

Other participants included mostly women and youth from both provinces with only a handful being men.

Meanwhile inner peace building activities were carried out by fitness trainer and yoga instructor Mr Jackson Manuai.

This was to ensure the participants reflected on inner peace as an alternative to reactive outbursts and to teach them how to build inner peace.

The process ended with positive personal reflections from all of the participants and challenged them to take on their action plan to bring to their society what they have learnt and most likely impact some of them.

Amanda Kundil