Local peacebuilders are the hidden heroes of wars and conflicts. These local experts are in every country, town and village where violent conflict takes hold.
They are the community leaders, activists, youth groups, women’s groups, networks and social movements who are resisting violence and building peace in their communities. They’re the people who make the brave and difficult choice to stay when crisis hits. To step into the middle of the fight, arms outstretched. To stand up to discrimination, even when it’s easier to turn away. To hold on to hope when it seems lost.
Their bravery and imagination makes peace possible, despite decades of conflict. They help communities and individuals heal, rehabilitate and build new futures. But they shouldn’t have to do this alone.
At Peace Direct, we provide direct support, practical assistance and emotional solidarity to local peacebuilders around the world. We partner with 27 local peacebuilding organisations, working closely with them on a long-term basis. But we also support individual peacebuilders and networks more widely.
We raise funding to help them keep running their organisations, lead projects with their communities and deal with emergencies when disaster strikes. We facilitate conversations with policymakers whose decisions affect our local partners. We sit together in times of crisis, offering moral and emotional support. We share knowledge gained from decades of working in peacebuilding, connecting local peacebuilders across borders to facilitate collaboration and learning.
We have no one-size-fits-all approach to our support for peacebuilders. All peacebuilders, and the contexts they work in, are unique. The work they do and the challenges they face are all specific to how violence has affected their communities. Our partners lead the way in telling us what they need from us, and we work together to identify the best way we can make a non-violent future possible, together.
Local peacebuilding is the diverse, practical and challenging work of tackling conflict at its roots. It is led by local people, who know the conflict best and can use unique approaches, perfectly tailored to the needs of their communities, to build peace that will last.
It ranges from negotiating with armed groups to free child soldiers, to providing mental health support to people affected by violence. It’s helping divided people to put down weapons and find common ground. It’s standing up to discrimination and ensuring the inclusion of women and other marginalised groups in politics, peace processes and community decision-making. It’s providing education, sanitation, and shelter. It’s creating opportunities for nonviolent routes out of poverty.
Learn more about some of these areas of work:
We are proud to have meaningful partnerships with local peacebuilders, based on principles of trust, respect, flexibility and mutuality. We believe this approach to partnerships leads to more sustainable peace.
Lasting peace is only possible with the leadership of those closest to the conflict. They are best placed to react to emergencies, bridge divides and recognise the most effective pathways to peace.
To us, being locally led means:
This approach works. When local communities create, implement, and evaluate their own initiatives for peace, they see high levels of community buy-in, ownership and, crucially, real change.
Learn more about locally led peace:
Trust is one of Peace Direct’s guiding principles, and we build it into our partnerships in several ways:
The impact of our trust-based approach extends beyond our own partnerships. It has encouraged our partners to change their relationships with peers, as well as to create more equal relationships with other funders and INGOs.
Learn more about trust-based partnerships:
Working in active conflict zones demands that peacebuilders are flexible and reactive. Our partners need to act quickly and effectively, so it’s vital that our support is flexible too.
For us, that means adapting quickly with them as their needs and plans change. It’s also about building unique partnerships with every partner – we have with no one-size-fits-all models of working.
But most importantly, we prioritise the funding our partners most value – flexible funds that they can use however they see fit, not restricted to a particular activity, area or time period. Because when crisis strikes, it might be impossible to deliver a project that was planned months in advance. With flexible funding, peacebuilders can adapt and respond rapidly to meet the urgent needs of the community.
We are picky about which funders we work with, and push our funders to change inflexible or restrictive ways of working that we believe undermine local peacebuilders.
Mutuality underpins every stage of our partnerships:
When deciding whether to work with new peacebuilders, we conduct due diligence. But we don’t take a suspicion-loaded approach. We have open conversations about who we each are, our ways of working, and what we want to achieve together.
We’ve heard stories of peacebuilders being rejected from funding opportunities because they don’t have a particular document or didn’t check a particular box. We don’t think that’s right. We put people first, and administration second – building real relationships, not faceless contracts.
Learning: We support mutual learning exchanges, where our partners connect with each other. In 2023, we hosted an exchange with several Local Action Fund partners to discuss peacebuilding in restricted civic spaces. It was invaluable for our partners to build new connections and share expertise with each other, and for our staff to learn from them.
Accountability: In 2023, when researching our guide on Transforming Partnerships, we invited partners to share their perspectives on our progress towards equitable partnerships, including through an anonymous survey.
Our partners are encouraged to share feedback with us at any time. But we also conduct partnership reflections every 18 months, where we reflect honestly together on how to improve our collaboration.
PIN, our partner in Nigeria, says:
“Partnership reflection is one of Peace Direct’s approach to partnerships that stands out. […]. Challenges, learnings and successes are proactively shared openly in a timely manner. This is an invaluable exercise that has helped PIN to develop internal assessment mechanism and the improvement of our work.”
The funding most commonly available to local peacebuilders is in the form of short-term grants for specific projects, with strict requirements on the local organisations accessing the money.
But our local partners are often the first to respond in a crisis. They need to be able to do so quickly, without limitations. That’s why partners tell us time and again about how much they need and value flexible funding – grants that they can use however they see fit, not limited to a particular activity or area.
In fact, one local partner told us that they would much rather have £10,000 in unrestricted funding to work with than £100,000 in restricted funding!
We work with partners and funders to find ways to get funding to local groups that are quick and flexible. This means peacebuilders can adapt and respond rapidly to meet the urgent needs of their community.
We try to minimise the burden of paperwork and reporting for peacebuilders on the frontline, freeing them to spend more time on their vital work.
In times of crisis – whether a sudden resurgence of violence, or a natural disaster – we provide rapid emergency funds to our partners within days. These funds enable them to meet their own needs and support their communities until they can resume their peacebuilding efforts.
Flexible funding also keeps the lights on. For peace to last, peacebuilders need to keep working after a project ends. If funding was only ever supplied for specific, time-bound projects, but not for long-term running costs, it would be impossible for our partners to maintain their organisation’s existence. That would undermine our shared goal of building peace that lasts.
This kind of funding is so powerful, but there isn’t enough of it. We can only work in this way thanks to the generous support we receive from members of the public, who donate to Peace Direct, and funders who are committed to flexible approaches. That’s why we are dedicated to public fundraising and campaigning for funders to change their approaches.
Learn more about flexible funding from three of our best funders:
