Building paths to peace: Bo Peace and Reconciliation Movement
BPRM’s coordinator, Hassan Feika, with the award they received as Local Organization Best Performance in the Southern Region, 2007.
Letters from the Provincial Security Committee endorsing the work of BPRM and inviting them to a meeting to discuss cases of conflict in the region.
Photos © Rosalind Hanson-Alp
The path ahead
Due to their growing national recognition and success more dispute cases are reported to BPRM from other districts across the country requesting their intervention. BPRM is doing its best to ensure they prioritize intervention in order not to stretch limited resources. The greatest challenge is sustainability and this requires Conciliation Resources’ help to build the capacity of the movement to generate funding to support their work in the future. BPRM plans to continue to work with international partners, benefiting from the mutual exchange, while also pursuing alternative ways of generating further income for their work.
In looking to the future, Conciliation Resources has helped BPRM start the construction of a Peace Resource Centre in Bo town.
BPRM’s coordinator Hassan Feika explains that, “based on our experience in communities, the peacebuilding work we have done and the training of community volunteers, we realize that our work has helped stimulate development in communities. For this reason we wanted to start to focus on supporting skills training programmes. We want to make economic justice a component of social justice. Our new centre could cater for training peace monitors in economic as well as reconciliation skills”.Hassan recognizes that “conflict has arisen out of economic justice. In Sierra Leone, if a man cannot provide for his wife and children, what can he do? This creates a significant number of domestic conflicts” that help spark larger community conflicts. He believes that if they can support some livelihood training needs, particularly for youths. “It will help to maintain the peace as they will not want to go back to what they came from, conflict.”
The centre will also be a base for training and exchange visits for peace monitors and Chiefdom Peace and Reconciliation Committees, which has proved so successful in terms of motivating volunteers and helping people share their experiences, both of conflict and peace. Hassan is deeply committed to the work of BPRM and is quick to note that his colleagues are equally devoted. Indeed, the dedication of all BPRM staff and volunteers has led them through over a decade of challenges and with support from Conciliation Resources they have become a household name in southern Sierra Leone. They received a prestigious award in 2007 for Local Organization Best Performance in the Southern Province, Sierra Leone, from the UK-based Bo District Descendants Association. If public feeling is anything to go by, BPRM will live a long life, as Paramount Chief Kargoi II put it. “To me BPRM are life, because he who brings peace brings life.”
