Nell Bolton is the technical director for Equity, Inclusion and Peacebuilding unit at Catholic Relief Services’ headquarters in Baltimore, US, with programmes in Africa. In the lead up to 23rd anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security resolution 1325, she spoke to Africa Renewal’s Zipporah Musau about CRS’ peacebuilding initiatives in Africa and the role of women in sustainable peace processes.
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.
What are some of the most-effective peacebuilding initiatives you have seen work well?
We worked with an incredible group of women cross-border trainers in the Great Lakes region, who became powerful agents of reconciliation in the area where Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC meet. As these women grew their businesses while also developing their skills to understand and respond to conflict, they overcame the fear, suspicion and prejudice that had kept them divided.
These women formed robust socio-economic networks through which they strengthened their personal ties, and collectively they became respected advocates for peace. Their influence in their households, communities and with officials continues to grow, and the women have sustained their activities as COSOPAX: Commerçantes Solidaires pour la Paix.
Outside Africa, I can speak briefly about our long history of working for peace in Mindanao, in the southern Philippines. There are so many elements of that programme that have contributed to its effectiveness to the point that we're continuing to be involved in monitoring the peace accord, and working collaboratively with the Bangsamoro authorities and the Government of the Philippines, to ensure that the ingredients for sustainable peace are there, and that women's political participation, young people's political participation, and the participation of all religious and ethnic groups in the Bangsamoro regions are at the table.
As the world marks the 23rd anniversary of the UN Security Council resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security this year, the participation of women in peace processes around the world remains low, despite the continuing disproportionate impact of conflict on women and girls. What do women bring to the peacebuilding table?
We know from studies of so many of these processes that when you have women at the table, those peace agreements are far more likely to be sustained, to be upheld and to be effective.
We need the voices of women at the table, not only as victims, or sometimes as perpetrators, but as stakeholders in our society, as half of our society.
If we are going to attain sustainable peace, we have to be inclusive of multiple perspectives. We must be able to hear the experiences from many different people, women included, and hear their ideas for the solutions.
Again, we need creativity and solutions we need to break out of established models and being more inclusive can only help to open us up to new possibilities and a new future.
What more can you say about gender equity and the role of women in peacebuilding?
Promoting women’s empowerment, gender-equitable masculinities, and prevention of gender-based violence are all priority areas for CRS’ gender programming.
And likewise, our peacebuilding programs frequently work to strengthen women’s participation and leadership in building sustainable peace. So, there are deep connections between the pursuit of gender equality and the pursuit of just and peaceful societies.
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 just concluded another learning study in Burundi to examine how working for greater gender equity and non-violent communication at the household level actually translates to and affects cohesion at the community level.
We had prior evidence of the significant impact CRS’ couples strengthening approach, “SMART Couples” has on greater equity for women and men in household decision-making. [SMART Couples refers to Strengthening Marriages and Relationships through Communication and Planning.]
This couples programme has been so successful that it has been increasingly taken up by local authorities and traditional leaders who really wanted to propagate it and spread it around other communities.
With this new learning study, we looked at how layering SMART Couples together with a Peaceful Masculinities approach might affect community conflict dynamics. Peaceful Masculinities applies an appreciative lens to gender norms.
The focus is not only on what is wrong with harmful gender norms, but also, what are the positive models that people can embrace? What are the strengths that men bring to their communities? And how can that be channeled into peaceful and positive avenues?
Our study found that in communities where SMART Couples and Peaceful Masculinities were carried out together, as compared to the communities where there weren't the interventions, we saw higher levels of social cohesion – as measured according to a 2016 UNDP’s measurement framework for Social Cohesion in Africa – as well as increases in women's participation in informal conflict resolution mechanisms.
We also saw higher levels of satisfaction with the outcomes of dispute resolution. While we would still like to see greater impact on formal conflict management mechanisms, we can see from this study that improving equity at that very intimate household level can have broader community effects when we intentionally engage the right leaders, and we start to address the broader community norms and structures that determine those relationships.
When people come together, they address the issues and challenges that are hindering their development. It makes them more resilient to future shocks and, and stressors and crises
What key ingredients contribute to the success of the peace initiative?
- Long-term partnerships over time with the communities. In COSOPAX, for example, the initiative has been going on since 2013. In Mindanao, it is also a matter of working very inclusively with Muslims, Christians, and Indigenous peoples to address identity conflict.
- Not stopping at that horizontal level but thinking strategically about how to work at the grassroots, at the middle level, and at the top levels so that any changes, any positive benefits play out in structures and in systems. The aspect of being able to think on multiple scales at the same time and be able to work in holistic ways that have contributed to some impact that we have seen there.
The world is changing, with new dynamics and emerging challenges. What are your future plans for Africa?
Well, our commitment to Africa remains very strong.
We are supporting and strengthening networks to reconcile people and bridge deep divides like we see in the Sahel and in the African Great Lakes region.
We are also investing in promoting better, more effective and accountable governance through our social accountability strategies, tools and approaches. And we are exploring new collaborations with a wide range of stakeholders.
We will continue to expand and grow our programming, in partnership with our local partners.
As I said, local leadership is a top priority for CRS to systematically and intentionally integrate social cohesion and justice perspective in our work. We have powerful examples of how doing so can be a win-win-win for the humanitarian-development-peace triple Nexus.
When people come together, they address the issues and challenges that are hindering their development. It makes them more resilient to future shocks and, and stressors and crises.
We would love to see others join with us to integrating social cohesion and justice in their work. We look forward to partnering with other organizations who are working across the triple Nexus.
