UNICEF and Interpeace partnership

Initiatives

Context

UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, to defend their rights, and to help them fulfil their potential, from early childhood through adolescence. In 2016, 535 million children – nearly a quarter of the world’s children – lived in countries affected by armed conflict, violence, and/or protracted crisis.

UNICEF recognizes that lasting contributions towards children’s rights requires addressing root causes of fragility, conflict and violence rather than merely responding to their consequences. To ensure that UNICEF investments and results are sustained in these contexts, it is imperative to move beyond service provision and humanitarian response and strategically invest in peacebuilding and sustaining peace interventions – including for violence and conflict prevention. As a result, UNICEF has committed to playing a more active role in the UN’s work on sustaining peace.



Partnerships

In 2019, UNICEF sought the services of Interpeace, made available through Interpeace’s Advisory Team – IPAT, to conduct an evaluative review of UNICEF’s programming on the prevention of violent conflict and peacebuilding. The review focused on the objectives and approaches of 21 selected peacebuilding programmes, including their design, training methodology, relevance, coverage, intended results/outcomes, and actual results.

Through this qualitative review, UNICEF intends to identify cross-sectoral programming that has a catalytic violence prevention and peacebuilding results across social, political, economic, environmental and cultural spheres. Moreover, the agency is interested in the areas where programming is strengthening capacities for social cohesion.



Evaluative review

In June 2019, IPAT applied a mixed methods approach for the qualitative evaluative review. It focused on assessing the extent to which UNICEF’s peacebuilding, violence prevention and social cohesion programs are effective, relevant and sustainable from a peacebuilding perspective and are successfully integrating conflict sensitivity approaches, outlining areas for improvement. Moreover, IPAT identified existing organizational assets, strengths and needs, that could enable UNICEF to better leverage its humanitarian and development programming in the service of peacebuilding and social cohesion goals. Additionally, IPAT developed actionable recommendations to strengthen UNICEF’s approach to peacebuilding, violence prevention, social cohesion and conflict sensitivity going forward.

Ressources