Building peace and food security: WFP’s work after Nobel Peace Prize
Specialist discusses her role as global awareness of connection between conflict and food security increases
Sharon Beijer was the UN World Food Programme’s (WFP) first field-based conflict sensitivity specialist. Here she tells us more about her role in Iraq, and life before WFP.
Tell us about your path to WFP?
I grew up in the Netherlands and when I left school, I wanted to be a judge. Every story has at least two sides and I love getting the full picture of something, rather than simply, ‘this is right and this is wrong, you are right and you are wrong.’ All the perspectives, and getting those properly represented, was my initial interest. I studied international criminal law, and started working for a local NGO in rural communities in Cambodia that also worked with the international UN-supported Tribunal, and then later joined the Court for a while. As a project design officer, I saw how our programming can support and impact upon communities. You can achieve a lot by helping people at the household level which can cycle through into larger-level societal changes. On the national level we worked to support the Cambodian government with policy decisions and implementation of human rights protection mechanisms that are equally important.
From law, how did that lead to becoming a conflict sensitivity specialist?
I was always interested in conflict and international relations. Often, analysis focuses on how conflict affects us, but while working for development and humanitarian organizations I saw how we can also affect conflict. We can have a great positive impact if we think deeply, about what we’re doing and why, and how it directly impacts on people and their context. A crisis has a large impact on a country and individually on people. The field visits, running training, talking with communities across the country, connecting with families and hearing their experiences, have been the best part of my work. We step back, think about how our work impacts people and their communities.
After more professional courses, I twice worked in Afghanistan — with stints back in the Netherlands — first managing evaluations of stabilisation and conflict resolution programmes and the second time I used that experience by training civil society organizations and NGOs, on awareness and skills to become more conflict-sensitive.
And now Iraq. What does your work involve, day to day?
On a practical level, I work to integrate conflict sensitivity into all workstreams of our programme. For example, a conflict analysis is now mandatory for project proposals from NGO partners — to ensure they understand the context in which we work — and we hold regular meetings with field staff on current conflict drivers and actors.
My work includes supporting human resources and communications, helping ensure our messaging and operations avoid risks. Conflict sensitivity in our operations includes bringing groups together who live where we are working, improving social dynamics. We are especially exploring this in our resilience-building work, where we have seen that communities who were previously mistrustful of each other are now jointly working on activities and created rapport and understanding. We have seen inter-tribe marriages following project participation, and indirectly mitigated conflict drivers such as access to water.
We also have an opportunity to prevent making a fragile situation more fragile. For example, a few months ago a partner wanted to change the selection of participants. But in an area that is already marginalized and facing other conflict tensions, such a change could have furthered eroded relations between the originally selected community and a new selected community. So, all the way through the project cycle we need to be aware of different conflict drivers, and ensure none are triggered.
What exactly is a ‘conflict driver’?
Say there are two communities who want to access the same water, and we are working in this area on an irrigation project. The potential conflict driver is ‘access to water.’ It’s our responsibility to include both groups in our project in a way that not only resolves the water-irrigation issue but highlights the common advantage of working together, sets up sustainable water management committees and, if possible, builds social cohesion.
Wherever possible, I work to enhance community relations. At WFP the reach and scale mean we can have a quite a large impact, potentially. We think carefully about: where does our work touch upon existing divisions and grievances, how can we design our programming to address those, or help improve a situation? We can both minimize the negative impact and maximize the positive impact.
We are running several conflict analyses, including in Basra and Thi-Qar, which have complex societies with multiple conflict drivers, such as access to natural resources, unemployment and weak citizen-state relations. There is much potential to support building social cohesion, as an integrated element of our livelihoods and social protection projects there.
What are your next steps?
Iraq is transitioning to a post-conflict state, but conflict sensitivity risks remain. We perceive ourselves and our work in a certain way, but do the communities we support perceive it the same? We take all these elements into account and can have a massive impact: to help build happy, prosperous lives.
Some of us are lucky to have what we have, to be born where we were, but everything can be very different. My work has made me very aware of that, but also allowed me to see people’s resilience and hope, even in the most challenging situations. Multiple people shaped what I think is important, or can have an impact. I can’t say it was one person — it was everything.
I love helping build the capacity of our partners, to deeply consider what we are doing, why we do it, how we can do it better. To go beyond ‘doing no harm’, get actors involved on a larger scale to do good: community leaders, civil society organizations, local authorities and more. It’s motivating to see how partners who were first wary and unsure why WFP is focusing on conflict sensitivity and contributions to peace, are now coming to me with potential risks they noticed, or ideas to incorporate activities to support more peaceful communities. There’s a lot to do, but WFP has a key role and people are interested. It’s a long-term approach.
With thanks to WFP’s partners who make conflict sensitivity work and research possible in Iraq: Germany, the EU, Sweden and more.
