Today, over 1 billion people still lack access to clean water and electricity. Environmental and climate change exacerbates this problem and exposes fragile and conflict-affected communities to further risk and insecurity. While the link between resource scarcity and conflict is well understood, the potential for natural resource governance to facilitate peacebuilding is less well researched.
On Thursday, October 5, 2023, ICAN welcomed Bas Berends, Co-founder and Chief Partnership Officer at OffGridBox, to join our WASL community call.
ICAN and our partners in WASL have always recognized the need to break down silos between the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated in stark terms how women peacebuilders are present, active, preemptive, and responsive to crises, leveraging limited resources to tackle multiple challenges in fragile contexts. To better respond to situations as they arise and meet the immediate humanitarian and security needs of their communities, women peacebuilders are combining their peacebuilding work with the provision of livelihoods training activities. To complement donor funding, some women peacebuilders are implementing income generation and “self-resourcing” strategies that enable them to autonomously fund and sustain their peacebuilding work.
On Wednesday 15th December, we held the first of an ongoing series of discussions about this expansive topic. In our final thematic WASL call of 2021, WASL members from Yemen, Cameroon, Tajikistan, Libya, Liberia and Syria shared their experiences combining livelihoods support, income-generation and self-resourcing with peacebuilding activities.
