Foreign Aid and Conflict Resolution in Africa: Experiences from Kenya

Over the years it has become more and more evident that peace building and conflict transformation are all-encompassing concepts/themes that need a further articulation for a better understanding of not only the practitioners but also for the general population across the continent. In the past people in these fields have tended to isolate individual and particular processes and have accorded very thin relationships to these human processes. Yet they all involve the lives of human beings. Over the years, organizations such as Amani Peoples Theater (APT) have been involved involved in processes that invoked a lot of research findings from amongst the communities in which they worked. They went about staying longer within communities and beginning to understand the dynamics within the communities, social, economic, political, and so on, thereby providing the possibility of better judgment in terms of the pathways that are desirable while making interventions in the areas of conflict, peace and development. In so doing, they were able to discover together with the stakeholders the need to address conflict and peace building issues in a ways that are holistic and sustainable.