Promoting Social Cohesion and Conflict Transformation through Insider Mediators

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Arab region and among the world’s least developed countries. While the country has witnessed successive conflicts over the last decades, the most recent conflict, which began in March 2015, is the worst in Yemen’s history. There are 20.7 million people in need some kind of humanitarian or protection support and 9.8 million of them are in acute need of assistance. An estimated 17 million people – 60% of the total population ‐ are food insecure while seven million of them do not know where their next meal is coming from and are at risk of famine. Yemen has become a regional and international battleground, resulting in tremendous economic and social difficulties. The conflict has thousands of civilian causalities, wide destruction of public and private properties, and generated a significant influx of internally displace persons (IDPs).

As of publication, there are over 18.8 million Yemeni in need for some kind of humanitarian assistance, according to United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.1  Within this context, Search for Common Ground (Search) is leading a United Nations Development Programme‐funded (UNDP) project, Promoting Social Cohesion and Conflict Transformation through Insider Mediators. The project is part of the UNDP Integrated Social Cohesion and Development and Transitional Justice Programme. Implemented from November 2015 to August 2017, the goal of this project is to enhance community resilience to violence in four communities (Al-Ma’afer and Al-Shamaytain in Taiz and Lawder and Moudiah in Abyan) in Yemen.  

A final evaluation of the project was conducted in order to capture project results and impact as well as to gather data to increase the effectiveness of future Search programming through continued learning. Qualitative and quantitative tools used to gather evaluation data can be found in Annexes 3 and 4. The project activities (conflict scans, community dialogue meetings and small grant) were implemented in Taiz whereas in Abyan the project implemented the conflict scan only. The qualitative data (KIIs and FGDs) were collected from both Taiz and Abyan; where quantitative data (Survey) were collected from Abyan only.