Peacebuilding with women

• at the community level
  
• at the national level
• at the decision-making level

We have been working with women in Burundi since 1995, in both rural and urban communities and with women politicians. The increasing role of women in public life is an important change that gives cause for hope, but equality of opportunity for women is still a distant goal and much work remains to be done to achieve it.


The community level

Since 1996 we have worked at the community level with Dushirehamwe, a network of women peace activists that started as an International Alert training project and is now an independent local association. Dushirehamwe has around 125 members who have all been trained as trainers in strategies for addressing conflict and gender relations – skills that they have put into practice in working with women leaders all over the country. It is estimated that the network reaches out to over 7000 women at the community level. It is gaining increasing national recognition and is often asked to defuse tensions in the community.

Women in the network come from a variety of backgrounds including social and community workers, nurses, church members, women working with grassroots NGOs and teachers – all providing strong linkages with local structures and people.

Current and proposed work by Dushirehamwe includes:

• assisting the repatriation and reintegration of refugees and displaced people
• training women on their rights and responsibilities and on political participation
• enabling better linkages to be created between women at the grass-roots level and women decision-makers, through regular exchange meetings
• identifying critical advocacy issues regarding women's roles in post-conflict society, and developing an advocacy strategy around these issues

With thousands of refugees and internally displaced people returning, their are inevitable tensions over land claims and other issues. As Dushirehamwe groups are based all over Burundi (and many of its members have previously been displaced themselves) they are ideally placed to work closely with communities to ensure that refugees are not rejected and that they readapt as well as possible.

Whilst there is high representation of women in national level structures, there is poor representation of women in local administration. In this post-election phase, Dushirehamwe is working to improve women's awareness and capacities at the community level so that they can better participate in public life. In this way, Dushirehamwe is becoming the link between women at the community level and the national political level. Members of Dushirehamwe have also represented the interests of their members at the recent United Nations/African Union Conference on the Great Lakes Region.

Contact Dushirehamwe
Dushirehamwe Association
Tel: +257 21 93 10
Email: dushirehamwe@cbinf.com

The national level

Women’s organisations in Burundi were extremely active in lobbying for their inclusion and participation in the August 2005 elections. As a result of this, the new constitution makes provision for women in 30 percent of decision-making posts. Dushirehamwe and another Alert partner organisation, CAFOB (the main collective of women’s associations in Burundi, with 30,000 members) played a key role in establishing a platform of women’s organisations which analysed the draft constitution and electoral code from a gender perspective, lobbied the political parties and the mediators of the peace process for amendments to the new constitution and related laws and developed joint strategies for mobilising women to take part in the 2005 elections.

It is important that the gains made by women during the transition period are not lost in the post-transition period. To help ensure this, CAFOB and its partners work to make gender violence a major political issue in Burundi and to address impunity, thereby restoring women's dignity. Amongst other things, Alert supports CAFOB to further raise awareness of sexual violence through use of media (radion broadcasts; local theatre; and television) and through an information campaign on the adoption of the new law on rape and sexual violence.

The decision-making level

Before and during the transition period Alert worked with SOFEPA, an ethnically and politically mixed forum of 39 women parliamentarians and senators since it formed in 1998 to push for the inclusion of women’s agendas in the highest decision-making spheres of the state. Since 2003 we worked with them to plan how they can engage more strategically in peacebuilding in Burundi and the wider Great Lakes region. We are currently assessing the most effective way to work with women parliamentarians in the new government.

For more information, contact Sylvie Pereira

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Last updated: October 2006