Building the Case
Two events a week apart, both centered explicitly on women's role in peacebuilding. On April 20, 2024, a Sensitization Workshop was held on "Fostering the Role of Women for National Peace Building Process in Dire Dawa Administration." A week later, on April 27, a Panel Discussion followed on "Gender Equality and Its Contribution for Peace Building," at Karamara Hotel.
From Training to Dialogue
On May 14, 2024, a Capacity Building Training was held on "Meaningful Participation of Women's in Peace Building Processes and Conflict Management." It was followed on May 18 by an Inclusive Community Dialogue with stakeholders on strengthening women's engagement in the peacebuilding process.
Cleaning Together, Building Peace Forever
The T-shirt slogan gives the chapter its title. On the morning of December 22, 2024, 100 participants (30 men and 70 women) swept streets and cleared roadside debris along Dilchora to Jemal Rogora Road, the campaign organized explicitly to strengthen social cohesion while beautifying the city. Several women worked in masks and headscarves alongside the men, SIDA, Life & Peace Institute, and EDI all branded on the shirts. The same day, a separate Women for Peace Workshop ran across town at Ras Hotel (100 participants: 28 men, 72 women, a poetry competition, and a peace-board signing), a related event not part of this set.
Capacity Building Workshop for Women
A two-day workshop under the program's full name, Community-Led Conflict Transformation through Participatory Action Research (PAR), bringing together women leaders, representatives of women-led organizations and unions, and EDI staff to strengthen understanding of women's roles as peace actors. About 70% of the two days ran as group work, brainstorming, and self-reflection rather than lecture, and included direct training on gender-based violence, covering topics such as the perpetrators of gender-based violence. Participants also practiced mediation and negotiation through role play, and came away describing stronger grounding in GBV prevention, women's rights advocacy, and conflict analysis; several later reconnected with each other outside the workshop to share peacebuilding experience and help reconcile people in conflict.
A Second Cleaning Campaign, With Women at the Center
This was a "Clean Village, Peaceful Community" cleaning campaign held under the Community-Led Conflict Transformation Through Participatory Action Research (PAR) program in Woreda 05 on November 21, 2025. Unlike a same-category Woreda 09 campaign from the same period (participants overwhelmingly male, and left out of this story for that reason), this cleanup was genuinely women-led: women make up roughly half to a clear majority of the group throughout, sweeping, hauling debris, and holding hand-lettered pledge signs alongside the men. It was one of fourteen site-level peace actions that dialogue participants across Dire Dawa and Harar designed and carried out themselves in the final weeks of the 2025 cycle; Woreda 05's drew 64 participants, with the stated objective of promoting peace and unity through the campaign itself.
A Women's Group Stands by an Elder Neighbor
This moment carries no formal program markings: just a group of women carrying water to an elderly neighbor's doorway, washing her hair, and sitting with her. It's the most specific, human moment in this whole story, and the only chapter without confirmed program details, so it's presented here simply for what it is: quiet, unannounced care.
A note on this draft
The folder for Chapter I/II's May event is labeled "May 27, 2024," but the event's own recorded date is "18/05/2024": that date is used here. Chapters I and II (April–May 2024) sit before or right at the edge of the program's SIDA/LPI-funded period (May–December 2024), with nothing further confirmed about either event beyond what's shown here; they may belong to an earlier or separately-run phase of women's programming, worth confirming with program staff rather than assumed. Chapter VI, dated June 2026, falls outside the program's documented 2024-2025 activity and carries no confirmed program branding of its own; its connection to the program is contextual, not independently confirmed. A separate "Woreda 09 Cleaning Campaign - 2025" folder was deliberately left out of this story: its participants were overwhelmingly male (re-confirmed on a second look), so it didn't fit a women's-focused narrative. Woreda 05's cleaning campaign (Chapter V) was checked the same way and does show genuine, prominent women's participation. A separate "Women Workshop Event - 2025" folder was also reviewed and found to be the same July 2025 event already told in Chapter IV, just a larger raw set of the same day, not a new chapter.
What's missing: the names of the women's group and the elder woman in Chapter VI, and first-person testimony throughout (named individual testimonies exist elsewhere in the program's 2024 and 2025 activities, but none are confirmed to belong to the people or events in this specific story, so none are used here). The hand-lettered pledge signs in Chapter V were not translated beyond a rough gloss (personal peace pledges): get a confirmed translation before quoting them. Program staff should add all of this before this goes to a funder.
EDI · Draft photo story · Not for external distribution