Youth and Peace Education (YPE)

Research and Publications (RAP)

Since the early 1990s, peacebuilding has emerged as a distinct field of policymaking and research. Yet, many aspects of the peacebuilding agenda remain highly contested. For instance, throughout the past decade, internationally pioneered peacebuilding practices have been focused on creating stability rather than long-term peacebuilding strategies that include quick-fix solutions, short-term engagement and exit strategy.  It is in this regard that WANEP has prioritized the need for a combined approach that involves research with the overarching goal to assess and monitor conflict indicators. This has also been to broaden and shift the scope and norm of peacebuilding practices from ‘reaction to prevention’. This is to ensure that, the causes of conflict will not only be identified, but the best strategies for approaching them will be formulated to prevent conflicts.

Objectives

• Develop tools, methods and approaches necessary to prevent violent conflicts in the West Africa Sub-region.

• Facilitate research in the area of peacebuilding and formulate new methods and strategies emerging from best practices and research.

• Facilitate the dissemination of research findings among the interested public, academics, and practitioners

• Create awareness on human security through research and publication.

The existing ad hoc approach to peacebuilding observed in Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone are justifiable evidence to suggest that practices emerging from research in the West Africa Sub-region yet remain underdeveloped. The available findings have limited analytical quality with limited policy recommendations, as in the case of Guinea Bissau. They also tend to focus almost exclusively on the short and medium term solution, whilst the long term process expected to build sustainable peace and development are largely disregarded. What in fact is required here is a coherent research-based practice that will help to address the interrelated phenomena of peacebuilding in a systematic and co-ordinated fashion at the national and regional levels.

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)

Monitoring and evaluation has been one of the most neglected areas of peacebuilding in the past years, partly due to the lack of proper planning, a well established M&E framework, and resources purposely dedicated to the process.  As such, peacebuilding practitioners in West Africa, including WANEP are increasingly confronted with the challenge to concretely demonstrate the positive impact of their work.  Despite the positive strides made so far, WANEP’s peacebuilding practitioners realize that there is a discrepancy between measuring the desired outcomes and their peacebuilding initiatives. Another challenge is to provide credible and objective data on the causes, trends, and triggers of conflicts in order to ensure timely intervention in conflict situations. The reason is that quite often, policy makers and CSOs have encountered gaps in information, which prevent them to design appropriate response to some crises.

Objectives:

• Present a framework for monitoring progress, assessing impact and deriving lessons from best practices

• Build the capacity of WANEP National Networks Coordinators on monitoring and evaluation techniques to integrate and own monitoring and evaluation in all programs.

• Measures the outputs of projects, programmes, partnerships, and assistance activities, and their contribution to peacebuilding and conflict prevention.

• Monitoring results to provide information on the relevance or effectiveness of an existing peacebuilding approaches

• Review and strengthen specific tasks and efforts to improve M&E systems at national and regional levels

• Document and disseminate successes and impact of WANEP’s work across the sub-region

This has highlighted the need to enhance effective M&E framework for sustainable peacebuilding programmes. The need to develop mechanisms or tools to monitor conflicts, determine the impact of WANEP’s work and produce relevant documents is critical as WANEP forges strategic partnerships with other institutions such as CSOs, governmental institutions and bilateral donor agencies which normally require impact assessment tools be integrated in funded projects. This program is designed to be integrated in all the activities of WANEP. All WANEP personnel will therefore be trained with the knowledge for peacebuilding monitoring and evaluation.

Expected Outputs

• WANEP inspired Monitoring and Evaluation Tools

• Context specific Impact Assessment methodology and tools

• Lesson Learned WANEP stories and publications

• Academic and practiced based research publications

RAP M&E QUICK LINKS

Research and Publications

Monitoring & Evaluation