In 2019, the African Union adopted the theme ‘Silencing the Guns’ for the year 2020. The initiative aimed at preventing and stopping all forms of violent conflict by the end of 2020. However, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant effects on emerging economies on the continent presented new challenges that governments are still grappling with, more than a year later. The causes and enablers of violent conflict in the Sub-Saharan region are varied as they are numerous – from West Africa to the Great Lakes region, non-state armed groups have continued to demonstrate that the state no longer has a monopoly of legitimate use of violence. With the increased proliferation of small arms and light weapons, weak governance, and a burgeoning youth population in these states, it has become increasingly important to rethink and redesign community organizing. But what does that look like?

In the article ‘Community as a Response: Communities Organizing for their Development’, development practitioners and community leaders Ese Emerhi, Florence Kayemba, and Charles Kojo Vandyck highlight the challenges for local communities in Africa. Beyond that, they map out the priority interventions donors should invest in to support community actors in building resilience when responding to power dynamics within the broken aid system in the Global South.

Read the full article of TrustAfrica here.