FAO and Interpeace partnership

Initiatives

Context

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. As recent news from Yemen, the Horn of Africa, and other contexts has shown, eradicating hunger remains a preeminent challenge of our time. It is also illustrative that the majority of severe hunger crises occur in situations affected by violent conflict. It is now widely recognized that none of the Sustainable Development Goals, including the eradication of hunger, can be achieved without finding better ways to address and prevent violent conflict through joint efforts of national stakeholders and the international community.

In this vein, FAO has been developing a corporate framework outlining and defining how it intends to contribute to sustaining peace through its interventions. FAO has established a body of work and tools over the years for addressing conflicts related to their immediate areas of engagement, including natural resource management, land tenure and forestry, amongst others. It is now seeking to take these efforts and practices a step further by more systematically incorporating conflict analyses and conflict-sensitive approaches in its work.



Partnerships

In 2017, FAO sought the expertise of Interpeace, made available through Interpeace’s Advisory Team (IPAT), to operationalize their new corporate framework.  Over the course of 2018, Interpeace and FAO developed and tested tools that enabled more systematic and robust conflict-sensitive programming.

In 2019, Interpeace and FAO embarked on a second phase of this joint work. Currently, IPAT is supporting FAO to further strengthen its internal capacities and processes for conflict-sensitive programming, as well as distilling typical pathways through which FAO programmes contribute to local peace impacts, within the scope of its mandate.



The Programme Clinic Facilitation Guide

One of the most important products from this partnership was the The Programme Clinic Facilitation Guide. Following a year of testing in FAO field offices, this publication is a self-explanatory guide that helps users make their project or programme conflict-sensitive. The guide provides a multi-step process that empowers staff to effectively apply conflict-sensitive programme design in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Twelve FAO country offices have used this Programme Clinic approach to date, which is supported by a Guide to Context Analysis to inform FAO decision-making. The Programme Clinic Facilitation Guide is the first step in an ongoing process that will help further strengthen the contributions to local peace through FAO programmes aimed at strengthening resilience and achieving socio-economic development outcomes.

Ressources