Breaking the Silence

Women’s Grassroots Engagement in Sustaining Peace in Fragile Communities.

Abstract

This study ‘breaking the silence: women’s grassroots engagement in sustaining peace in fragile communities’ explores the unnoticed yet transformative and encouraging role those grassroots women play in promoting peace in communities that are vulnerable to conflict. Despite their frontline presence in settling local disputes, meditative role, fostering healing, and repairing damaged societies, their contributions to peace initiatives are still mostly ignored in official peace procedures. Through a qualitative approach, the study draws secondary data from scholarly publications, international organization reports, and documented materials while thematic content analysis was used to examine the data. The study observed the effectiveness and efficiency employed by the grassroots women in settling conflicts through various means which are usually not noticed by the formal institutions, the data shows that grassroots women play a crucial role in fostering reconciliation and fostering resilience in those conflict-ridden communities. But patriarchal conventions, a lack of institutional backing, inadequate money, and exclusion from official peace talks limit their activity. The study then recommended among others that acknowledging and formalizing the contributions of women at the grassroots level is crucial to maintaining peace in vulnerable areas and the formal institution should create gender-inclusive peace policies, providing local women peace builders with specialized resources and training, protecting female activists legally, and purposefully incorporating their work into national and international peace building plans.