THE SASAKAWA PEACE FOUNDATION

Establishing a Cooperation Platform for Peace Building

12,000,000 yen [Grant Project]
Japan Platform (Japan)

In a peace building process that ranges from the emergence of crisis to reconstruction stage, various actors including NGOs, international organizations, governments and/or military forces of countries involved are separately engaged in support activities, resulting in inefficient distribution of human or physical resources or overlaps in assistance. Although there are some budding efforts for better inter-organizational coordination, most of them are led by the military forces, and because of this origin, such efforts have yet to serve as effective solutions due to the wariness in the minds of local people in the affected areas. This project aims to construct a model of inter-organizational collaboration led by private-sector entities in peace building activities. Cooperating with NGOs based in Japan and abroad as well as international organizations, it plans to develop manuals for inter-organ collaboration. Training workshops will be also provided to enhance understanding of inter-organ partnership. Furthermore, an electronic bulletin board shall be created and operated in an effort to resolve skewed distribution of information available in the front-line of activities.
The following activities are planned in the first year of the project.

Baseline Survey (April-September, 2007)
Toward the establishment of collaborative structure, a series of interviews with domestic and overseas aid agencies including the UNHCR will be conducted to collect information about past experiences, existing guidelines, etc.
Development of Manuals
(1) Four workshops will be held in Tokyo inviting aid organizations operating in the field as well as research institutions.
(2) Based upon the analysis of outcome of the above workshops, a manual covering logistics and information sharing will be developed.(October 2007)
(3) Through a three-day pilot training (November 2007), the manual shall be put to a test for necessary modifications to be made.
Electronic Bulletin Board
Toward an end goal of rolling out an electronic bulletin board in the field, a BBS system will be furnished to handle information sharing and communications amongst operating aid organizations in parallel. A pilot version will be created (April-August), followed by checking of operations (September-October), and a pilot testing performed by actual aid organizations (November).

(First year of a 3-year project)