Maskani Digital Peacebuilding Closing Workshop Report

On October 23rd, the Center for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security – Rongo University together with Build Up team members facilitated a workshop for 25 participants divided into students, university faculty and community members representatives. Each university invited the 3 top performing students, resulting in 9 women and 9 men, while all other students were invited to the certificate ceremony by Zoom and an afternoon WhatsApp live chat session following the workshop.

The students and faculty met in advance among their student teams to develop their collective ideas on the way forward and possible next steps for the Maskani program. The workshop ran for a full day and aimed to create links between the program and the community peacebuilding initiatives, offer a space for discussion on project reflections and way forward and share findings of the program with the participants.

The objectives of this workshop were to award exemplary students who had completed their tasks during the sprints, create a space where the community representatives would engage with the students and faculty to identify ways, they could support each other in future and share findings of the program. Concretely, the participants:

● Received certificates for their participation in the full program
● Exchanged experiences and got to know one another
● Learned about offline peacebuilding programs in their communities and how the Maskani work could be integrated and or support these programs
● Learned about the program findings on what worked, and what did not, collective challenges and lessons
● Began brainstorming and planning on the next steps for the program in the lead up to the Kenyan general election in 2022

The main output of the training was to seed initial ideas from students and faculty, together with the community representatives on goals they would like to achieve through Maskani and how to scale the program. For both Build Up and Center for Media, Democracy, Peace and Security (CMDPS), the aim was to close the workshop with an idea of which new themes the participants would want to focus on, and to know roughly how the community would be a part of the Maskani program. The workshop summary below goes deeper into the specific outputs of the conversations that ensued throughout the day.