Accelerating the implementation of Liberia’s National Peace and Reconciliation Roadmap, and building the capacity of implementing partners, is critical to ensuring the sustainability peacebuilding programmes as donor funding elapses. In order to establish concrete next steps for the implementation of the Roadmap, ACCORD has partnered with the Liberian Peacebuilding Office to facilitate local actors in developing a Reconciliation Trust Fund and an associated mobilisation strategy.
ACCORD’s Peacebuilding Unit (PBU) partnered with the Liberian Peacebuilding Office to organise and facilitate the forum and was a member of the Technical Review Team. From the 23-25 April, 2014 in Monrovia. This partnership was owned by local actors, especially the Peacebuilding Office. During the three day forum, local implementing partners of the Roadmap explored next steps in implementation and discussed the creation of the Reconciliation Trust Fund. By the local actors gathering to share experiences, challenges, and expectations, the differing viewpoints of various sectors, particularly between civil society and governmental actors of several ministries, is further understood. Thus, capacity was built for stronger coherence and coordination in actualising the next steps.
As a part of an ongoing partnership with the Peacebuilding Office, ACCORD has supported capacity building initiatives such as this forum for ten over years. In this event, ACCORD contributed to building the capacity of local actors implementing peace and reconciliation processes by sharing knowledge and international experiences in related fields. By facilitating the conversation of a locally run process, ACCORD helped identify new opportunities for cooperation between the government and civil society actors which can result in a more cohesive, coordinated and synergistic approach to implementing the roadmap. The event contributed to the wider goals of the PBU’s engagements with Liberia from two angles. First, by helping to build the capacity for stronger coherence and cooperation of between civil society and the government in Liberia for implementing the peace processes in Liberia; second, by better contextualising the nature of ACCORD’s partnerships with Liberia so as to continue providing context-specific and tailor-made resources to the nation’s peacebuilding process.
Through this activity, the Unit was able to identify and initiate contact with key actors for upcoming engagements in Liberia scheduled for later this year. This event thus strengthened the partnership between ACCORD and the Peacebuilding Office, especially in regards to learning each of our relevant strengths for future engagements. Furthermore, in bringing together different sectors to discuss the present challenges and future expectations of the Roadmap, the forum was beneficial for moving forward. As other nations are also engaged with developing coherent and coordinated frameworks for stronger engagements between civil society and governmental actors to implement peacebuilding processes, the lessons learnt from this forum are timely and valuable.
