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BUILDING BRIDGES
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Building Bridges is an initiative to encourage and reward Kenyans to reach out to others to overcome conflict.
The Peace Heroes campaign, an initiative of Butterfly Works and Media Focus on Africa was a big success.
Holding peace meetings, offering shelter to people from other tribes, writing peace songs and organizing soccer games amongst warring factions were some of the winning initiatives of the competition.
Kenyans could nominate fellow Kenyans who undertook extraordinary peace initiatives by text messaging, cell phone or Internet and these were then mapped using the Ushahidi tool.
With our new campaign ‘Building Bridges’ we want to recognise existing initiatives and stimulate new ones.
Initiatives which contribute to overcoming conflicts within or between communities e.g. villages, neighbourhoods, faith groups, families, and businesses.
Conflicts can be related to land issues, ethnicity, corruption. By using a competition element we seek to motivate both individuals and organisations to take action and register their initiative, activities and organisation.
We are currently developing an internet platform which will foster collaboration and interactivity across peace initiatives.
The landing page is already up and running, Get Involved and make Kenya a safer palce.
In February 2010 people can start uploading their peace initiatives and activities to the map.
