Civic
Education Programme Activities
The CRD’s civic education program is conducted through
rural and urban workshops, public meetings, community exchange
programs and seminars where communities are educated and
trained on the following 5 thematic areas;
III.
Conflict Resolution and Conflict Management
Despite the existing community mechanisms of resolving conflicts
such as public forums, indigenous knowledge systems and
other traditional strategies of resolving conflicts people
have inadequate understanding of the dynamics of conflicts
and conflict resolution mechanisms hence the need to educate
them. Traditional leaders need to be capacitated on conflict
resolution mechanisms in order to strengthen their knowledge
base critical in order to manage the ever changing conflicts
in their communities mainly caused by the competitive political
environment.CRD identified this gap during its baseline
surveys, thus the civic education comes as a strategy to
impart traditional leaders and other community leaders with
conflict resolution, negotiation and mediation skills. Through
these workshops communities are helped to integrate indigenous
ways of resolving conflicts and the alternative dispute
resolution methods (ADEs) such as negotiation, mediation,
conciliation, arbitration, sustained dialogues and brokerage.
Conflicts arise from imbalances in communities, group, organization
or nations, for example, uneven distribution of resources,
unequal power sharing, discrimination, intolerance, poverty
among others. So communities must know the elements of conflicts
such as attitudes, behaviours, needs, positions and interests
vis-à-vis their impact in relationships. With the
illustration of games, satires, conflict typologies, participatory
tools and role plays communities get to know and understand
easier the ways of preventing, resolving and transforming
conflicts.