On 21 May 2020, the Founder and Executive Director of ACCORD, Dr. Vasu Gounden, was invited to be resource person in a UNDP-hosted session focusing on Impact – Measurement and assessment of prevention and peacebuilding efforts. The session was held as part of the 2020 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development that ran from 11-22 May 2020 with the theme Sustaining Peace in the Time of COVID-19.
The Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development is co-hosted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. It provides a platform for interdisciplinary exchange among high-level experts from the development, humanitarian, diplomatic and security spheres. Over the last six years, the Forum has grown from a small, Stockholm-based workshop series to a multi-day global conference with representation from 49 countries and over 120 institutions, including 19 national governments, 18 think tanks, 58 CSOs and 7 multilateral organisations.
The session, hosted by UNDP, was moderated by Dr Samuel Rizk, the Head of Conflict Prevention, Peacebuilding and Responsive Institutions at UNDP’s Crisis Bureau in New York and included presentations by:
- Darynell Rodriguez-Torres, the Executive Director of GPPAC, who focused on how to increase not only the presence but the influence of marginalized and vulnerable populations in intervention monitoring, and evaluation, and to improve downward accountability mechanisms;
- Roudabeh Kishi, the Research Director at ACLED, who focused on how to use long-term data analysis to measure and where necessary, adjust peacebuilding efforts, as well as how to improve qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis techniques for cross-case analysis;
- Adrenne Lemon, the Institutional Learning Director at Search for Common Ground who focused on how to measure whether a conflict has been prevented through a peacebuilding project, and how to ensure that evaluation and impact assessments not only ‘do no harm’, but leave a ‘peacebuilding footprint’; and
- Vasu Gounden, who focused on how to measure the quality of peace, and the vulnerability of that peace to conflict relapse.
Vasu Gounden was a resource person at the 2019 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Security.
