On Friday,18 May 2007, the Project Director from Freedom House Southern Africa, Vukasin Petrovic, and Helen Barnes (their Senior Programme Officer) visited ACCORD House where they met with ACCORD staff headed by the Deputy Director of ACCORD, Jerome Sachane.
Freedom House Southern Africa is currently working on a capacity-building initiative for Zimbabwean civil society groups. One area that they will be looking at is negotiation strategies and skills – both with external stakeholders and in the form of internal consensus- or coalition-building. Their visit to ACCORD was to discuss ACCORD’s participation in their planned workshop/forum on the above theme.
Last week ACCORD hosted visitors from the Zimbabwe-based Centre for Peace Initiatives in Africa (CPIA), who are currently involved in the National Dialogue taking place in Zimbabwe.
In 2000 Jerome Sachane was selected to be part of a team commissioned to assess the post election conflict situation in Zimbabwe. He has also worked on establishing a Civil Society Track to the Arusha Peace Process dealing with the then Burundi Peace Negotiations and was instrumental in the creation of dialogue between the Civil Society Leadership and the facilitator of the Burundi peace process, former South African President Nelson Mandela. Mr. Sachane has also served as part of a team that assisted the Defence and Security Matters Commissioner (The former Head of the Military Government of Nigeria – General Abubakar) during the InterCongolese Dialogue that was held at Sun City in South Africa. He continues to work extensively on post conflict reconstruction in Burundi, where ACCORD opened a country office in 2003.
