Resolve Network
Location: Democratic Republic of the Congo
Grant Amount: $50,000
Grantee Website: www.resolvenetwork.org/
Areas of Impact: Economic Sustainability, Gender Equality
Mission of Resolve Network
Resolve empowers women and men affected by conflict to reclaim their lives, rebuild their communities, and build peace from the ground up. Through a participatory approach to peacebuilding, they reinforce conflict survivors’ capacity to achieve measurable, sustainable peace from the individual, to the communal, to the societal level.
Summary
Demobilized women combatants and sex slaves in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) face specific challenges and trauma when they return to civilian life. This places them at risk to remobilize and return to the militias that recruited them in order to survive. The main goal of this project is to sustainably reintegrate women ex-combatants into civilian life. This project fosters profound improvements in these women’s lives, allowing them to earn an income, feed their children three nutritional meals per day for the first time in their lives, support their children’s schooling, and have a home. These gradual changes allay these women’s fear and isolation and gradually help them to reintegrate into civilian life. As communities learn to accept them, they work with these women to build resilience against conflict dynamics and towards lasting peace.
Why We Love This
Resolve Network is unique in its very successful approach to reintegrating former female child soldiers from combatants to peacebuilders. Resolve Network steps in where the international community has failed because of official policies that favor men, unconscious bias, and prevailing conditions. This project works with these former women combatants and communities to first demobilize the combatants, offer services, training and support to reintegrate them, and then make them change agents in peacebuilding. Resolve Network’s work demonstrates the importance of having the women themselves be part of the process and be the decision makers and influencers of their own destiny.
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