Alliance For Peacebuilding

Learning and evidence: afp's biggest accomplishments in 2024 for developing an evidence base and standards of practice include: 1. Releasing an updated interactive, participatory platform for the eirene peacebuilding database, enhancing usability, real-time updates, and enabling user contributions. 2. Launching a project to identify and promote effective locally-led peace-building practices, leveraging past research, network analysis, and iterative reviews to assess successes, challenges, and operational barriers. 3. Successfully completing a multi-year interreligious action grant integrating evidence-based approaches into interfaith initiatives, highlighting the need to move beyond contact theory, incorporate accountability mechanisms, and ensure sustained engagement for more impactful interfaith peacebuilding, while also addressing challenges in institutionalizing evaluation, stakeholder engagement, and long-term sustainability. 4.concluding the usaid-funded laser pulse project, in collaboration with air and acled, developing a learning agenda and evidence base to enhance armed conflict and violence prevention. Establishing a credible and accessible evidence base for making the case for peacebuilding is a central priority for afp. Afp strengthened the peacebuilding evidence base through joint research, policy initiatives, and knowledge-sharing exchanges for practitioners, donors, and policymakers, ensuring findings were actionable and learning-driven. Afp hosted peer learning events, working group and community of practice meetings, and numerous peacecon sessions, including: what is the future of measuring peace?, global fragility act mel innovations, global and local ways of assessing the effectiveness of peacebuilding, and measuring diplomatic engagement for effective peacebuilding and conflict prevention. These served as vital platforms for fostering collaboration and mutual learning amongst policymakers, funders, academics, and practitioners and strengthened the peacebuilding community's ability to effectively socialize and apply research-driven insights. During 2024, afp updated its guiding steps to peacebuilding design, monitoring, and evaluation, initially published in january 2018, detailing seven standards every peacebuilding program must include to contribute to robust evidence and learning. This guidance helps professionalize peacebuilding evaluation and highlights how programs should be measurable, evidence-driven, ethically conducted, and widely socialized. Afp published a new interactive and participatory platform for the eirene peacebuilding database that allows for increased usability by researchers and consistent updating by afp. In addition, the new platform incorporates advanced analytics to track user engagement and identify who is accessing the database and how they are utilizing it, which will facilitate more targeted improvements. In the next stage of the database's refinement, afp will further categorize the indicators to align with principles for peace's eight principles, increasing streamlined language and metric usage across the field and providing a new avenue through which users can search the database. Afp completed the implementation of a multi-year interreligious action grant in partnership with porticus that facilitated the peer learning community for evaluation of interreligious dialogue initiatives (plc). The purpose of the grant was to actualize a strong culture of learning and evaluation among local peacebuilding organizations and help integrate more evidence-based approaches in interfaith peace initiatives. Mel interfaith cooperation report: by evaluating 104 indicators of how programs measured success, theories of change, and the reliability of indicators, this report concluded that moving beyond contact theory, incorporating accountability mechanisms, and ensuring sustained engagement could strengthen future interfaith initiatives. Evidence summit report: during peacecon, afp convened an evidence summit of plc members and partners to discuss findings and recommendations on interreligious action peacebuilding. The key takeaway was that interreligious dialogue is a crucial, evolving tool in peacebuilding and conflict prevention, but its success depends on context, inclusivity, and alignment with local realities. Sharing evidence and results through the plc, networks, and events like the evidence summit is key to optimizing the use of interreligious dialogue as a vital and integrated component of larger peacebuilding efforts. Theory of change evaluation report: this report evaluated the theory of change for porticus' enabling effective dialogue program, which was largely valid and successfully improved interreligious evaluation practices through knowledge generation, stakeholder engagement, and the development of measurement tools. However, challenges in institutionalizing evaluation practices, engaging broader stakeholders, and addressing external political barriers limited the program's systemic impact, highlighting the need for stronger integration into formal institutions and long-term sustainability strategies. This report is a tool to inform and ensure more effective future programming seeking to advance local level dialogues, particularly amongst interfaith groups and stakeholders. The plc state of the community report: given the multi-level outcomes of the plcindividual, network, organizational, and field-widethe network evaluation approach assesses the plc using multiple tools. The report notes that the plc effectively strengthened individual capacities, network cohesion, organizational practices, and field-wide evaluation methodologies in interreligious dialogue. Future research can build on these lessons to enhance peer networks, sustain engagement, and institutionalize knowledge-sharing practices. Measuring peace: how the peacebuilding field can enable and evaluate effective interreligious dialogue: saurav upadhyay, one of afp's lead researchers who started the project, provided a detailed overview of plc, its goals and outcomes, and the future of interreligious dialogue as a means of peacebuilding and conflict prevention in this widely disseminated podcast. This year afp concluded the long-term assistance and services for research (laser) partners for university-led solutions engine (pulse), a usaid-funded project, in partnership with american institutes for research (air) and the armed conflict location and event data project (acled), through which afp developed a learning agenda to establish an evidence base for effective approaches to armed conflict and violence prevention and created resources and guidance to support the integration of the findings into government and community efforts. The project team identified six key themes through extensive stakeholder engagement and evidence reviews, resulting in sixteen technical reports and briefs that advance understanding of conflict-sensitive peacebuilding, violent extremism prevention, climate security, and monitoring, evaluation, and learning. Afp socialized the reports across the membership, including presenting them to relevant working groups to better build the evidence base for effective peacebuilding interventions in these sectors. In 2024, afp started a new project to identify and promote effective practices for locally-led peacebuilding. By building on its previous research and policy briefs, this project aims to delve into what works, what does not, and how to overcome cultural and operational hurdles. This project will include iterative reviews of successes and failures, referential network analysis, and exploratory research and interviews. Findings will inform the creation of evidence-based standards and recommendations, which will be shared through educational materials, capacity-building workshops, and advocacy campaigns. Toward the end of 2024, afp began carrying out its referential network analysis to map the state of locally-led peacebuilding mechanisms, which will be ongoing.

Peacecon and membership: afp's biggest accomplishments in 2024 for accelerating collective action include: 1. Convening peacecon 2024: status quo no more building peace in the time of rising violent conflict, which attracted more than 1,000 participants from 34 countries to explore and tackle the challenges facing the peacebuilding community. 2. Increasing afp's membership from 185 organizations to 228 including strong representation from the global south to build a stronger collective network to advance the peacebuilding field. 3. Holding the first-ever digital peacebuilding expo, which gathered hundreds of participants to take part in interactive demos of digital peacebuilding tools and promote exchange and learning between digital peacebuilding practitioners.afp expanded its organizational membership from 185 to 228 organizations, with increased representation from the global south. Afp's convenings and events averaged about two per week, during which members, experts, policymakers, academics, donors, and beyond discuss significant best practices, innovations, and how to advance the peacebuilding field. Afp's major convenings in 2024 included peacecon 2024 and the inaugural digital peacebuilding expo. Peacecon 2024: status quo no morebuilding peace in the time of rising violent conflict, afp's flagship annual conference, attracted 1,000+ participants from 34 countries. The conference brought together senior officials, thought leaders, policymakers, and practitioners from around the globe to explore and tackle the challenges facing the peacebuilding community. Major speakers, including former president of ireland mary mcaleese and assistant secretary of state anne witkowsky, drove conversations on anticipating shocks and disruptions; integrating conflict prevention; rebuilding trust; and peacebuilding in a multipolar world. The digital peacebuilding expo, hosted in partnership with search for common ground, the toda peace institute, mercy corps, and the council on technology and social cohesion, gathered more than 300 people for a series of interactive, practical demonstrations and presentations of digital peacebuilding tools to promote exchange and learning between digital peacebuilding practitioners. Afp hosted numerous other convenings that accelerated collective action in 2024. In may, afp co-sponsored a session at the stockholm forum on peace and development with the u.s. Department of state's bureau on conflict and stabilization operations on the integration of climate action and conflict prevention in coastal west africa. At the high-level political forum on sustainable development, afp co-hosted two events with the tap network, cspps, pathfinders international, and world vision that highlighted the urgent action and commitments needed to implement sdg16+. Afp convened a member consultation on syria within a week of president assad's ouster, during which 88 members shared analysis and recommendations to inform afp's policy statement. Afp also co-hosted an event that featured numerous syrian civil society leaders on how to build peace and democracy.

Public awareness and partnerships: afp's major accomplishments for shaping and amplifying new narratives in 2024 include 1. Continuing its training of members and building a campaign based on afp's narrative research that better explains that peacebuilding is practical and actionable. 2. Increasing afp's media reach by increasing its followers and establishing a presence on new platforms bluesky and threads, as well as engaging with the traditional media, with features and coverage in devex, just security, and borgen magazine. 3. Collaborating with key partners to advance the #sdg16 now campaign, which aims to build support for work that contributes to a more peaceful, just, and inclusive world. Throughout 2024, afp continued its peace framing and narrative research and activities so the peacebuilding field and its partners can better communicate what peacebuilding is and why it is needed now more than ever as a practical, common-sense, and worthwhile investment. Afp leveraged its peacebuilding communications community of practice to discuss and socialize best practices for peacebuilding storytelling, including for fundraising and education. Afp collaborated with the tap network, cspps, the quaker un office, forus international, civicus, ace africa, the international legal foundation, the legal empowerment fund, my world mexico, and others to advance the #sdg16 now campaign, which aims to build a more peaceful, just, and inclusive world. The campaign urges progress toward global sdg16+ implementation by influencing norms, policies, and practices through communications and mobilization. Afp continued to promote its "what is peacebuilding?" campaign and #peacebuildingis collection of practical and actionable stories, and looking forward is planning a comprehensive project to develop a peacebuilding narrative infrastructure as the next step of this work. In 2024, afp continued to expand its social media presence to amplify key peacebuilding narratives. Afp now has almost 27,000 followers on x, more than 41,000 followers on linkedin, 16,000 followers on facebook, and an instagram following of more than 7,000an increase of 2,500 since the beginning of 2024. Afp also established a presence on new platforms, including bluesky and threads, to promote our work across emerging online spaces. Afp also continues to engage with the media, with features and coverage in devex, just security, and borgen magazine. In addition, afp produced two new episodes of our "got conflict? Let's talk peacebuilding" podcast, downloaded over 150 times.