General News

Read our 2009 Impact Report

Listing the peacebuilding NGO’s strategic achievements in the last 12 months, the report is also candid about the challenges the organisation faces, in light of global economic turbulence and the attendant risks to regions prone to violence in many of the 20 plus countries in which they work.

International Alert and the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) will be hosting a panel debate on the future of overseas development aid, Moving Beyond the Millennium Development Goals on September 8th at the RCS in London.

This event comes two weeks before the UN General Assembly will review progress against the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and coincides with the launch of a new International Alert report which questions the usefulness of the MDGs.

Between 28th June and 1st July, International Alert gathered together Georgian and Abkhaz civil society activists and experts in the latest in a series of “dialogue through research” meetings intended to shed new light on the conflict and explore different ways of thinking about conflict-related issues.

International Alert, together with Amnesty International UK, CARE International UK, Oxfam GB, WOMANKIND Worldwide, Women for Women International UK, and other members of the Gender Action for Peace and Security (GAPS) network, is launching the No Women No Peace. competition, a competition for creative people.

Between 17th-20th July 2010, International Alert’s Economy & Conflict project partners, the Caucasus Business and Development Network (CBDN), organised the Second Caucasian Cheese Exhibition in Tbilisi, Georgia. The exhibition brought together Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian and Turkish producers, experts and officials to promote dairy sector cooperation in the region. 

Since the widespread violence broke out in the south of the country in April and June this year, International Alert has sent staff members to Kyrgyzstan on three separate missions in the past two months. Their purpose was assessment and to start to engage in face to face meetings with politicians, religious leaders and leaders of civil society groups from all sides of the conflict. On this basis, we have put together a comprehensive peacebuilding plan for the country with three key strands:

International Alert, together with partners Equal Access Nepal and Youth Action Nepal organised a series of interaction programmes with members of the Constituent Assembly (CA) of Nepal and representatives of the Ministry of Youth and Sports. The programmes were aimed at advocating for issues and concerns that came out of a research and dialogue process, part of a three-year initiative funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which seeks to contribute to building and fostering a constructive role for youth by ensuring their access to security and justice in Nepal.

Since May 2010, Burundi has embarked in a marathon electoral season, with five successive elections (at district, presidential, legislative, and village level) over a period of five months.

In the district elections on May 24th, the ruling party won a landslide victory. Despite some minor irregularities, international and national election observers stated the elections were largely fair, while opposition parties claimed they were fraudulent and withdrew from the election process.

Heads of State will meet in New York on 20th - 22nd September this year to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were agreed by UN Member States ten years ago to inspire increased investment and effort to improve people’s lives in developing countries. These include important measures such as infant and maternal mortality, school attendance, household incomes and hunger, amongst others.

Acknowledging that the rehabilitation of ex-combatants is critical to sustainable peace in Nepal, which is in turn crucial for long-term economic development, a recent workshop of private sector leaders in Kathmandu resulted in a display of willingness and openness towards providing support to ex-combatants, when and as required by the government and political parties.

Together with its Caucasus Business and Development Network (CBDN) partners from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia as well as South Ossetia, International Alert participated in the 20th Economic Forum in Krynica, Poland between 8th-11th September 2010. It was the fourth time CBDN participated and chaired a panel in the event, often dubbed as the “Davos of Central and Eastern Europe”. This year, CBDN was among the Forum’s official institutional partners.

In just two years’ time, elections in Sierra Leone will mark a decade since the end of the bloody civil war. Since the war was officially declared over, there have been some notable achievements. The country’s first peaceful and democratic handover of power from one political party to another took place in 2007. Free health care for all pregnant and breastfeeding women has been introduced to combat Sierra Leone’s alarming maternal mortality rate.

The second of Alert’s psycho-social trainings for teachers from South Ossetia took place between 20th-22nd September in the city of Istanbul, Turkey. Following on from the first seminar in Brussels earlier this year, the agenda and methodology used aimed to impart skills required to deal with individual and social trauma, the result of repeated cycles of violent conflict in South Ossetia, most recently in August 2008.

International Alert and Réseau Haki na Amani, a Congolese NGO, have recently published a manual in order to support local communities dealing with land conflicts in Ituri, a North-eastern district of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

International Alert’s submission to the International Development Committee Inquiry The 2010 Millennium Development Goals Review Summit: Looking ahead to after the MDG deadline of 2015

In this submission, we focus on looking ahead to after the MDG deadline of 2015, and: