African Woman and Child Feature Service

This training is a collaboration between AWC and the Kenya Correspondents Association and will involve carrying out training workshops for journalists addressing conflict management issues.

The training will also focus on the communities through what we call Media encounters when the journalists and the communities attend workshops together with the aim of providing deeper understandings on the communities’ perspectives on certain issues for the media. Our program also provides significant strengthening to district and provincial government officials.

The program will assist men and women in communities likely to be affected by strife, to establish “Community Mediation Councils.”  Council members will learn conflict management skills and collaboratively develop and implement plans to construct/reconstruct elements of infrastructure (such as wells, enhancements to markets, etc.) that will benefit multiple communities.  Over the program period, the Community Mediation Councils will gain the skills needed to become self-sustaining community-based organizations. 

The program will focus on building awareness of conflict management approaches at the community level and promoting indigenous and contemporary approaches to conflict resolution.

The Community Mediation Councils will be established to strengthen community awareness of conflict prevention, mitigation, and resolution mechanisms. The Councils will also develop and enhance community members’ full and active participation in decision-making in affairs affecting peace in their communities.

It is important to note that these Community Mediation Councils will not serve to replace traditional or formal conflict resolution modalities, e.g., councils of elders – indeed we envisage that many participants in traditional approaches will also be members of Community Mediation Councils – but rather to provide additional resources and cross-community authority to effect non-violent solutions.  

The media in Kenya has lived up to their claim as “watchdogs”. They vigorously put politicians to task over critical national issues and invested heavily in public education election programming.

As public watchdogs the media were the first to bring to public attention the tallying anomalies of presidential votes that led to the current political crisis in Kenya. They also showed live the sharp political divisions and fights at the ECK media centre, where the results were being read, between various political parties, ECK and observers. For the first time in media history in Kenya, political bickering and alleged state complicity in election fraud were being played live in Kenyan sitting rooms and public places. The reactions were swift and furious following the announcement of presidential results.