Blog

The main aim of the community dialogue was to provide a safe space for communities to come together and talk about issues that concern them. The dialogue approach sought to enable these community members to increase mutual understanding and improve relationships between them for peaceful coexistence and social cohesion.

In March 2023, intra community dialogues were implemented in the target areas which targeted  youths, women, elders, and religious leaders. EIP has successfully conducted a total of 44 intra community dialogues on the 22 target Kebeles.

Most importantly, In its short lifespan of the project year, the intra-community dialogue in each kebele has created an important change in the peaceful coexistence of different ethnic groups in the target kebeles.

Those participants of the project who used to worth their ethnic or cultural values only started to respect others’ values and cultures to enable and exercise peaceful coexistence; A participant of intra-community dialogue in Hamer, Mershakuluma Keble said an important point which could be taken as a positive elaboration and also a success story:

I learned about my own cultural values through the intra and inter community dialogue I participated. I thought I knew very well about my culture, but I realized that I didn’t truly know it until I compared it to the other cultural values. Before I joined the project and attend the intra and inter community dialogue, I saw things by the Hamer cultural standard or my standard based on the Hamer background. But now I learned that people have different standards and perspectives based on individual and cultural backgrounds and the project enables me to see others culture in different shoos and respect, understand and valued to live in cohesion.