Engaging Tribal Communities Across Pak. Afghan Border in Building Trust and Peace
With the realization that grassroots communities from tribal regions along the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan have remained at stake in the war on terror and with the conviction that the concerned communities contribute towards addressing the trust deficit between the two countries, a civil society Peacebuilding project was launched by SPADO jointly with the United States Institute of Peace and WADAN the Afghanistan based partner organization. The project envisages bringing together community elders, local government officials, religious leaders, traders, journalists, teachers and personnel from non-government organizations from across the border together to engage in an active discourse over issues concerning themselves, factors behind mistrust and recommendations to build trust and peace on the foundations of their socio-cultural commonalities for lasting peace in the regions.
In the first stage of the initiative the members of conflict resolution facilitators network from both Afghanistan and Pakistan were trained in dialogue facilitation skills. The first series of dialogues comprising 72 individuals including females took place in Jalalabad in April 2010. Activists from various segments of tribal communities were brought together for a discourse on problems of their areas and proposed solutions to these. In the upcoming stages further dialogues will be held and capacity building of the group on advocacy and dialogues skills will be undertaken. The initiative anticipates holding two national conferences at the national level each one in Kabul and Islamabad to integrate recommendations elicited from the series of dialogues and forwarding these to the governments of the concerned countries as well as international community to inform local, national and international policies with regard to the communities residing along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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