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