Peacebuilders
CARE South Sudan
20 July 2010
In March 2010, RTC provided training in conflict sensitivity to staff from CARE South Sudan and their partners. The aim of the training was to prepare the participants for their research on the Underlying Causes of Poverty/Vulnerability (UCPV), enabling them to look at the impact that conflict has on their programmes and, in turn, how their programmes might influence the conflict.
In South Sudan, CARE's work is focused around working with marginalised groups, those without a voice. They target three groups of people in each of their programmes: rural women of child bearing age; rural adolescent girls; and rural male youth. They support these groups through a variety of humanitarian and development programmes. To ensure that their programmes are effective, CARE places the people they work with at the heart of their programmes - by involving community members in the process of understanding the root causes of poverty and jointly making decisions about interventions to address those causes.
The training was conducted by RTC Associate Paul Clifford, who provided staff with a workshop that introduced them to conflict analysis tools and conflict sensitive programming. Participants were able to test the tools on their own situations to understand more about the conflicts in the locations in which they work. This helped participants to understand what conflict means to their programme work and how to develop their work within a conflict sensitive approach.
"I will use the conflict analysis tools to arbitrate, mediate and reconcile conflicting parties either within CARE as an organisation or outside CARE; being a focal point person for training and social services, this training has helped me a lot to disseminate the same to beneficiaries."
- Participant
As a result of the training the staff acquired a good grounding in conflict sensitivity, which they can now use to conduct their research. RTC will provide ongoing support to staff members from CARE South Sudan as they implement the changes into their work, so they will have the opportunity to ask questions and seek further support if they need to do so.
"Participants were very enthusiastic, energised and receptive to the training they were being given. They'd had little training in this subject before, so the material was very new to them. Hopefully, once people see how the techniques work in practice, it will spread to other CARE country offices around the world. I particularly hope the international staff will take the learning with them and spread it to other places when they leave south Sudan."
- Paul Clifford