Women Peace and Security– engaging women in preventing and countering violent extremism
Countries of Evaluation
- Kenya-Prevention/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE), 2018
- Uganda-Evaluation of the Peace Building and Protection Systems, 2016
Why is the engagement of women in preventing and countering violent extremism important?
In the last few years, the East and Southern Africa region has experienced a sudden surge of violent extremist activity and a substantial shift in its security landscape. There is evidence suggesting that gender norms have strategically been used and manipulated for violent extremism purposes such as the use of gender stereotypes for recruitment, perpetration by women, and using their roles to facilitate evasion from counter-terrorism measures. UN Women is engaged in programmes that aim at involving women and women groups in efforts to prevent and combat terrorism and violent extremism in the region. They include initiatives that build women’s capacities in mentoring, negotiating, and mediating to participate meaningfully in political and peace processes. They also include work on evidence-based advocacy to comprehensively understand the drivers and impacts of women’s active participation in responding to terrorism and violent extremism in the region.
Which approaches have proven effective in preventing and countering violent extremism?
In the area of capacity building, UN Women programmes adopted adult-based and skill-oriented training approaches, which proved useful for increasing women’s confidence, knowledge, and skills about their rights. They also helped in reducing women’s fear of speaking out. It showed a useful approach to offer integrated capacity-building workshops for both men and women, with the majority of beneficiaries being women who were trained on entrepreneurship, human rights, and countering violent extremism. However, the trainings were very intensive with a short duration, which negatively impacted overall training effectiveness. Integrated capacity-building workshops, including men, with majority beneficiaries being women were trained on entrepreneurship, human rights, and countering violent extremism. At the same time, training of traditional and other transitional justice structures does not only require a one-off training workshop, but needs follow up, on-site support and monitoring to address gaps in knowledge transfer and specific circumstances during application mediation.
Evaluations found similar limitations regarding trainings of traditional and other transitional justice institutions. One-off training workshops were found to be less effective but required follow up, continuous monitoring, and on-site support.
UN Women programmes helped to enroll local women communities to take active roles in community peacebuilding initiatives, in the formation of support groups and to increase women’s engagement in security structures. While this resulted in enhanced collaboration and coordination amongst project stakeholders, women’s participation in key decision-making positions remained limited. This was mainly due to factors related to community and cultural beliefs, which might take a longer time to change. Support groups have also been formed alongside increased engagement of women in security structures, all of which have led to increased awareness of violent extremism among women.
The evaluations also highlighted that support for women and girls who were formerly associated with extremist groups require holistic approaches that address issues around livelihoods, psychosocial and protection assistance. Beneficiaries may require long term psychosocial support to treat post-traumatic stress disorders. The support needs to be provided in a flexible way that is driven by individual needs. Circumstances may change hence the programmes require continuous monitoring
How can UN Women improve its work on engaging women in preventing and countering violent extremism?
UN Women should continue building the capacity of duty bearers so that they can effectively fulfill their obligations in responding to women’s rights.
It is also important to integrate elements into future initiatives that look at improving the relationship between security agents and members of the community, in particular women. Given past experiences with harsh security measures, a careful cultivation of trust and dialogue between law enforcement staff and community members is essential.
Psychosocial support for women is only effective if provided on a long-term basis. Similar projects should be structured to provide such kind of support, including counseling to the family of women formerly associated with extremist groups to ensure full integration for them and their children.
UNW should capitalize on the experience from its women, peace and security programmes and derive lessons for developing intervention models that have the potential for scale-up in other fragile situations.
Related to this, UN Women should make use of existing contacts and networks in its programmes to facilitate knowledge sharing amongst implementing partners and help position UN Women as a recognized authority in the area of women, peace and security.
It is recommended that UN agencies in joint programmes and those with complementary activities consider targeting the same geographical areas to ensure a holistic support approach and increase chances of achieving impact. This could include working in similar sub-counties and villages and organizing joint coordination meetings in communities.
Lastly, evaluations have demonstrated that training of chiefs and local leaders alone does not lead to improving mediation practices at traditional courts. Chiefdom and community level committees should also be included as they conduct the actual hearing and recording of cases.