As is true around the world, women in the Pacific Islands are often leaders in organizations that can contribute to peace, yet they tend to work in unsupported and invisible roles.

The Pacific Centre for Peacebuilding aims to inspire, educate and create a needed safe space for women to dialogue, gain support and develop action steps.

Noting that short training sessions had a limited effect on women’s abilities as peacemakers, Koila Costello-Olsson, MA ’05, was an early proponent of a program focusing on women’s peacebuilding leadership. In June of 2011, she attended the consultation at EMU with 18 experienced global peacebuilders (including 2011 Nobel Peace laureate and fellow CJP graduate Leymah Gbowee) that developed the broad outlines of the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program (WPLP). Jan Jenner, MA ’99, was its founding director.

WPLP’s first class began in 2012, with 13 participants from Africa and three from the South Pacific. Class 2 included 16 participants from the South Pacific region and five from East Africa. Class 3, which began coursework at SPI 2014, is composed of eight women from Kenya.^[1]

A glance at a half-dozen of the WPLP graduates shows the way they are seeded throughout the South Pacific, from a prime minister’s office and a branch of juvenile justice to women’s rights groups and a theological college:

• Elizabeth Krishna, a lay sister in the Catholic Church, has worked in the office of the prime minister of Fiji under the current and previous three office-holders. She serves on the board of the ecumenical group Interfaith Search Fiji, which brings together 19 religious groups, including Christians, Hindus and Muslims, in an effort to build “bridges of understanding.” In 2016, at age 54, Krishna hopes to retire and prepare herself for further peacebuilding work by completing a master’s degree at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.
• Patricia Galama Gure, in the first cohort, is now deputy director for juvenile justice in Papua New Guinea, where she manages staff dealing with young people, aged 7 through 17, who come into conflict with the law. “I promote the use of a restorative justice approach,” she said in an email. “And I am heavily involved in collaboration or partnership initiatives within the communities.”
• Menka Goundan entered WPLP as a communications and research officer at PCP and now works in a similar position for Fiji Women’s Rights Movement.
• Ana-Latu Dickson works at the Pacific Theological College in Suva, Fiji Islands, coordinating its pastoral counseling program and providing mentorship to church ministers, lay workers and community practitioners who are students in the program. She also coordinates the EVAW program (Elimination of Violence against Women/girls), which provides training to church ministers, lay workers and community practitioners.
• Tarusila Bradburg is co-coordinator of the Pacific Youth Council, an organization that works with national youth councils or congresses in 10 Pacific nations, based at the Secretariat for Pacific Community.
• Georgia Clarinda Tako Molia is on the executive committee of Young Women in Parliament, which aims to see women stand for election, be elected fairly (amid the common practice of vote buying by powerful male candidates), and be among the first women to serve in the National Parliament of the Solomon Islands. She feels inspired to work with another WPLP colleague “to establish our very own peace institution for the Solomon Islands in the next three years. I have already started the dialogue with key people in the government and non-government sector to gather information/data to start the network and build from there.”^[2]

These WPLP women agree that the first change they experienced in undergoing peacebuilding training was on a personal level.

“God has to be moving somewhere,” Bradburg said. “We see it and feel it as it transforms us. You have to journey within it and sometimes the changes cannot be spoken. We have to value that space, because this learning journey is so different and so much more than the projects we are involved in and the work we do.”

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Footnotes

1. Funded by Bread for the World, Conciliation Resources, and the European Union.
2. There is precedence for a national-level peacebuilding institute emerging from a regional one – the Korea Peacebuilding Institute was founded in 2012 by some South Korean members of the Northeast Asia Peacebuilding Institute, which started four years earlier.

Among the 184 people who studied at SPI 2014 were eight Kenyan women in the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program (WPLP). Ranging in age from 23 to 51, the women work for a variety of NGOs or in academia across Kenya. Now in its third year, the WPLP admits students in cohorts from specific areas of the world to develop peacebuilding and leadership skills over an 18-month period, culminating in a graduate certificate from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. CJP works with partner organizations to identify candidates, and matches students with mentors. Previous cohorts have come from Somaliland, Liberia and the South Pacific. This is the story of one of the eight women in the current cohort.

Though it sits just outside Waji, a major town in Kenya’s North Eastern Province, the small village of Leheley has yet to join the electrical grid. The people who live there are poor and therefore marginalized. Running power lines there simply isn’t a priority to those in charge.

“My people support the leaders 100%, but their support is not reciprocated with any kind of development in the village,” says Shamsa Omar, who grew up in Leheley.

Education was Omar’s springboard out of Leheley and on to bigger ambitions. After earning top-notch grades at Wajir Girls Secondary School, she won a scholarship from a Kenyan bank to study at Moi University. And while still finishing up a BA in sociology, Omar launched a campaign to represent the Lagboghol South ward on the Wajir County Council, determined to let Leheley be ignored no longer.

She ran an enthusiastic campaign and says she’d drummed up widespread support until, just days before the March 2013 election, things came to a screeching halt. The elders in the community decided that Omar shouldn’t run, and that was that. What the elders say goes, even when you’re a young, status quo-bucking political candidate like Omar.

“I was very discouraged because I had the support of the people,” says Omar, now 23 years old.

Omar returned to the university to finish her degree and, since September 2013, has been working for the Center for Victims of Torture, an American NGO based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She now works as a psychosocial counselor in northeastern Kenya’s Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, home to hundreds of thousands who have fled conflicts in countries all over East Africa. In the camp, Omar leads individual and group therapy for victims of torture and gender-based violence – intense and sometimes distressing work that has caused nightmares.

It has also exposed her to an inspiring resilience that she sees in some of her clients. Before she began working as a counselor, Omar wasn’t convinced that sitting around and talking would do any good solving people’s problems. Now, she’s a believer.

She’s applying a resilience of her own to her goals for her home. After her run for office was cut disappointingly short, Omar realized that there are “many other ways” to lead. Accordingly, she founded the Wajir Young Women’s Association, through which she hopes to work with like-minded young women to improve the lives of women throughout the region. She also serves as a mentor to current recipients of the same scholarship that allowed her to get her undergraduate degree.

Omar says her experience so far in the WPLP has opened her mind, inspired and energized her – through the things she’s learned and her peers in the program.

“I cannot walk alone on this journey. I need so many people to help me out,” she says. “I have so many things in my mind. I have big dreams for my community.” — Andrew Jenner

In response to requests received over many years, this summer the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding is launching a specifically tailored to women who are oriented toward social change and who wish to develop their abilities to lead the cause of peace and justice in their regions of the world.

The women in this program will be scholarship-supported by donations and grants and will be grouped in cohorts with other women in their geographical area. The cohorts will move through the two-year program as a group, covering similar material and acquiring complementary skills while they together develop ways to maximize their impact on their home region.

This inaugural year the program will focus on women in three regions: Liberia, Somalia, and two South Pacific Island nations (Fiji and the Solomon Islands). The initiative is enthusiastically backed by Nobel Laureate . Her Gbowee Peace Foundation��Africa secured funding from USAID for four women from Liberia to participate.

Like Gbowee herself, most of the women in the Women’s Peace Leadership Program will be drawn from civil society organizations. They have proven themselves to be eager, intelligent change-agents, but they realize they need a better theoretical foundation for their work, as well as more tools for analysis, strategic planning, monitoring and evaluation, and organizational leadership. And they need each other! All cohorts will be divided into small sub-groups that will be assigned their own experienced mentor for the duration of the program. Some of the work will take place in the classroom, but much will occur in the field, in the women’s home regions.

We are very excited about the future possibilities for these cohorts, viewing them as a form of “critical yeast” to help their societies rise from conflict and from unequal treatment of women.

Though the women’s leadership program is new, women graduates of CJP have been playing leadership roles around the world for more than a decade, as will be evident from the pages of this issue of Peacebuilder. The new program is simply building on the work already being done to reduce violence against women and children and to create a more just, peaceful society for everyone.

In the first program in North America of its kind, 12 women from Liberia, the South Pacific and Somalia will gather as a carefully selected and wholly sponsored cohort at the 2012 Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI), with eight other fully funded women covering the same material at an East African site.