Benefits of Community Mobilization

From the experience of SAMBAD, it can be safely argued that community mobilization has increased participatory decision-making processes by bringing diverse stakeholders into a common space. It has expanded inclusion of voiceless, often marginalized populations, such as women, youth, and persons with disabilities, the elderly, and religious or ethnic minorities.

It also increased local ownership and promoted a more active and informed citizenry. SAMBAD uses a flexible approach in programming where local communities   design,     implement,   monitor and evaluate   by   increasing   public     participation, empowering local actors, and fostering a sense of community ownership. It seeks to increase local actors'  sense  of  ownership  in  an  intervention process, empower local communities, and create an environment  more  conducive  to lasting  peace. It recognizes that peacebuilding strategies  must give individuals and groups the opportunity to rediscover their inherent identities and regain their independence.
Conclusion
The central goal of SAMBAD’s community mobilization approach SAMBAD reinforces that peacebuilding process facilitates building relationships between the groups recovering from conflict. It is based on a holistic and in-depth understanding of the problems and the ways these problems are connected, of available resources, and of the respective agendas of the various actors.s to re-empower communities to make vital decisions and strengthen their capacity to address the legitimate needs and concerns.
Participation of local people in the process of conflict transformation is crucial because it helps to foster self-sufficiency and sustain peace over time. Creating such localized ownership involves transferring capacities and skills to recipients, and allowing actors at different levels to gradually acquire the skills and confidence needed to direct peacebuilding efforts.
Thus, SAMBAD promoted processes, structures, and spaces for instilling trust and harmony in the society through community mobilization. The contributions of these processes increased the level of community participation in planning, managing, and supervising peacebuilding processes. As demonstrated through examples from the project, community mobilization created mutual trust and respect, and ensured full cooperation between all stakeholders.  This method is strongly recommended for long term continuation and replication since conflict affected people will then be able to transcend their differences and meet on equal terms to promote sustained dialogue in the community and to participate in decisions that affect their lives.

Community Owned Process

SAMBAD helps the target communities to identify, prioritize and address communal needs of conflict affected people with   structured dialogues and interactions. By listening to the community, it has         provided the community with a forum to voice their grievances and thus promote reconciliation.

 It mobilizes the communities,     Implementing
Partners,and Peace   Volunteers  to  create  local
 platforms to promote  peaceful co-existence. A major output  of  this   approach is therefore  the creation of safe spaces for dialogue, reconciliation activities, and livelihood improvement plans which will include the participation of local people, in order to enhance local capabilities to forewarn and resolve conflicts before they degenerate to violent conflicts.
Community mobilization can help meet the expectation and accountability of societies in transition by changing attitudes, norms, practices and behaviors of individuals as well as change makers. As a result, communities are able to better assess mutual support, transparency and accountability. This shared accountability and responsiveness of key people and more people, as well as SAMBAD team and its Implementing Partners has enhanced mutual trust and harmony as well.
Community Empowerm
 SAMBAD aims at creating situations in communities which contribute to peace and stability in the area through community empowerment process. The empowerment of communities is a key component in which SAMBAD seeks to instill in community members the belief that they can affect change and can improve their own lives. Community empowerment is promoted through the provision of information, inclusive participation and decision-making, capacity building and the dialogue process itself. More specifically, SAMBAD seeks to empower working at three different layers of social complex: agencies, structures, and relationships through community mobilization process that allows them to define and prioritize their needs and to manage their own initiatives to address their needs. The community empowerment process works in synergy with the state and non-state institutions (agencies), builds healthy relationships and addresses the root causes or structural causes of the conflict. Such empowerment process often is proven to be resilient providing survival and coping mechanisms for insecurity and fragility. SAMBAD internalizes that local communities are better placed to identify their shared needs and the actions necessary to meet them. Taking charge of these processes contributes to a sense of community ownership, which can contribute to the sustainability of interventions. This has been reflected in SAMBAD's approach to build social capital in divided societies by providing safe spaces for interaction, communication and joint decision-making. Such processes can help to overcome mistrust and set precedence for peaceful and constructive management of local disputes.

Peace Volunteers as Community Change Agents

As part of the community mobilization process, 243 male and 297 female Peace Volunteers were provided with capacity building opportunities on conflict analysis, conflict sensitivity, dialogue and conflict mitigation skills for promoting trust and harmony, and diffusing potential conflicts at the community level.

In the first year, the Peace Volunteers, most of whom were conflict affected themselves, were motivated through counselling and trainings to carry outdialogue sessions and plan and conductreconciliationactivities.
 The volunteers conducted conflict analysis as follow up to the trainings they took part in. This helped them in identifying conflicting parties, their interests and needs, the root causes of conflict and its effects. Based on the results, the volunteers planned activities enabling community members to realize their role in resolving problems and encouraging unity and harmony at the community level. They also cted as bridge between Local Peace Committees and community members in facilitating the process of government relief and support programme to the targeted communities. SAMBAD strongly asserts that it is crucial to understand the context in which it implements peacebuilding programs. SAMBAD conducted both formal and informal context analysis at the project inception to understand the changing situation, to identify priorities and strategic points of intervention, and match capacity, skills and resources to the situation. It also provided orientation to Peace Committee members and Peace Facilitators on conflict analysis tools and methodologies.

Peacebuilding Actors

The major peacebuilding actors that SAMBAD targeted can be represented in the following matrix.
To carry out peacebuilding work, it is essential to engage with people at different levels.

The greatest focus of SAMBAD is on track 3 diplomacy, also known as people-to-people diplomacy, where local people and communities are encouraged for dialogue, interaction, and reconciliatory activities. This approach is focused at the grassroots level and involves organizing meetings and dialogue sessions, livelihood support and reconciliation activities for conflict affected people and communities to build healthy relations.Hence, the strategy that SAMBAD has embraced is multitrack diplomacy operating on several tracks simultaneously by establishing both horizontal and vertical ties.SAMBAD has employed multitrack diplomacy for engaging with actors of peacebuilding.In track 1 diplomacy, SAMBAD has engaged in dialogue and networking with high-level political leaders, policy makers, and Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction focusing on long term sustained peacebuilding at the national level.At Track 2 diplomacy, dialogue, and problem-solving activities aimed at building relationships and encouraging involvement of influential local leaders, peace committees, and government line agencies.

The collaboration with Local Peace Committees has complemented the government level initiatives in community peacebuilding.

Community Mobilization

Community mobilization is the process of engaging communities to identify community priorities, resources, needs, and solutions in such a way as to promote representative participation, good governance, accountability, and peaceful change. Sustained mobilization takes placewhen communities remain active and empowered after the program ends. Fostering people to be their own agents of change is the underlying goal of ‘community mobilization.’SAMBAD is driven by local needs and contexts and provides communities with the tools and support they need to transform their own conflict ridden emotions and grievances and at the same time deal with implications of the violent past.
With community mobilization, there is a higher likelihood that the program accurately reflects the legitimate needs and concerns of the local people. The approach takes into account the different experiences, needs and capabilities of diverse groups in a community. Instead of passive participation and tokenism, the project aims to motivate communities for self-mobilization.
As Figure 1 demonstrates, the interventions of SAMBAD activities are based essentially upon two pronged approaches related to actors who need to be engaged and mobilized for peace.
In order to change the values and cultures at the socio – political level, SAMBAD concentrated on the sensitization and capacity building of Local Peace Committee members both at the district and village

level with the belief that sustainable peace requires not only changes in attitudes and relationships but also changes in socio-political, or institutional, structures. At community reconciliation, it fostered to deal with violent past and improved trust, empathy, and resilient social ties to improve the non-likelihood of violence.Through its people based approach, SAMBAD concentrates on engaging large numbers of community people, particularly the conflict affected people, in actions to promote peace by ensuring broad involvement and mobilization of Peace Volunteers. Another aspect of the People to People approach its focus on involving influential people whose role is seen as critical to the continuation or resolution of conflict because of their network and  influence in their communities. The key people are members of peace committees, political leaders, social mobilizers, and Peace Volunteers and above all, Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction.

SAMBAD: Locally Driven Process

By its very design, SAMBAD is a project that addresses local conflict by increasing public participation, empowering local actors, and fostering a sense of community ownership in its interventions. SAMBAD uses locally driven peacebuilding approaches where the people affected by violent conflict work together to create and enact their own solutions to prevent, reduce, and transform the conflict locally. CARE Nepal has facilitated this entire process through technical engagement and backstopping with local actors. It is a bottom-up approach that inolves mobilizing local capacities, knowledge, and resources and thus building local ownership of the transformation process and outcomes.

 SAMBAD recognizes that people have the capacity to articulate, develop, and enact solutions to their own problems. Their knowledge and understanding about the complexities of their communities, situations, contexts, and cultures of the conflict can and should be capitalized on to effectively transform conflict and build peace. Equally important is to build the resilience of these communities so that they are more able to sustain the peace even without external support. As such, those familiar with conflict contexts are best placed to develop solutions to the problems they face, if and when they work together. Eventually, this process then contributes substantively to the peacebuilding efforts by helping
 define the problem, design and enact solutions, and evaluate the results

Additionally, SAMBAD has further reinforced the fact that locally driven approaches have the potential to be more cost-effective and efficient than the others. The project has adopted mechanisms where local citizens who were once part of the conflict design, lead, and implement dialogue and reconciliation activities originating in the local context