Building Peace from the Grassroots through Civil Society Engagements

Peace Education through Civil Society and Community Engagements

What Zimbabwe’s civil society teaches the world — and what it means for adult education and the future of peace education.

A study that we conducted on peacebuilding by civil society organisations in Zimbabwe, where we explored the opportunities and challenges that CSOs face, gets me thinking not just about peacebuilding policy but also about the opportunities for peace education in Zimbabwe. More so, about adult learners who are libraries of histories of conflict in their personal experiences, as well as about communities where education itself has been a site of violence or exclusion. This research, to me, is as much about how we learn about conflict as it is about how we can build sustainable peace. Since its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has survived wave after wave of conflict, mass protests, ethnic fragmentation, political polarisation, and the slow structural violence of inequality and poverty. Against this backdrop, civil society organisations (CSOs) have emerged as some of the country’s most consequential peacebuilders. Our systematic review as educators examines exactly what that looks like on the ground: what strategies CSOs use, what informal structures are achieving, and what stands in the way of sustainable peace.

Reading this through the lens of adult education, I am struck by how much the study’s core argument mirrors what we know about transformative learning in adult education. The most effective peacebuilding, we find, is locally owned, culturally embedded, and deeply relational — the same qualities that define meaningful adult education. This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern worth naming.

What I found most striking in the research

The study synthesises a decade of scholarship across Zimbabwe’s provinces. What I encounter in these pages is not a dry policy audit but a living map of communities trying, under enormous pressure, to create the conditions for human dignity. Let me walk through what stands out most.

1. The breadth and creativity of CSO strategies

What I did not expect during our study was just how inventive Zimbabwe’s civil society has become in the absence of meaningful state support. Far from operating with one-size-fits-all approaches, CSOs are deploying a remarkable range of strategies simultaneously.

       FIG. 2 — SIX CORE CSO PEACEBUILDING STRATEGIES

            All six strategies are bound by a commitment to local ownership and community-driven design.

What binds all six of these together is a commitment to local ownership. The most effective initiatives are those designed by and for the communities they serve. I think of this as the andragogical principle of starting where the learner is­, i.e., experience, applied to the entire architecture of the peacebuilding framework. 

2. Informal peace committees — the unsung classrooms of reconciliation

One of the findings I keep returning to is the role of Informal Peace Committees (IPCs) and Local Peace Infrastructures (LPIs). These grassroots structures — not government-created, not donor-funded — have emerged organically to fill the spaces that formal institutions cannot or will not occupy. They are flexible, inclusive, and culturally embedded. They bring together women, youth, traditional leaders, and minority groups who are routinely excluded from formal peace processes.

But here is what strikes me most as an adult educator: informal peace committees function as learning communities. The committee meeting is a form of structured dialogue. The conflict resolution session is a form of experiential learning. The community gathering is a form of participatory adult education. That these structures lack formal recognition is not merely a funding problem — it is a failure by states and institutions to see non-formal community processes as legitimate sites of learning, national reconciliation, healing, and governance.

3. Indigenous knowledge as curriculum

The study’s treatment of Indigenous knowledge systems is one of its most compelling contributions. Practices like kuripa ngozi (appeasing an avenging spirit in Shona culture), Ubuntu philosophy, and Ndebele spirituality provide what formal courts and transitional justice tribunals often cannot: moral legitimacy, emotional resonance, and a grammar of healing that the community already speaks.

4. Gender inclusion — progress that needs protecting

I am encouraged, but not satisfied, by what the research shows on gender. Informal peace structures have meaningfully increased women’s participation and minority representation — a real achievement in patriarchal contexts where formal peace processes are still dominated by men. But we are honest in our research that patriarchal norms and political dynamics continue to impede full gender inclusivity. And critically, when traditional practices are used uncritically — without gender-sensitive interrogation — they can inadvertently reinforce the very exclusions they are meant to overcome. For adult educators, this is a reminder that inclusive ‘pedagogy’ must be actively cultivated, continuously evaluated, and protected.

The obstacles — what this research refuses to romanticise

I appreciate that we do not fall into the trap of celebrating grassroots peacebuilding without honestly accounting for what undermines it. The obstacles are real, and naming them is the first step toward addressing them.

             FIG. 3 — FOUR MAIN CHALLENGES AND THEIR SEVERITY

Political interference tops the list. Zimbabwe’s civic space is tightly constrained, and CSOs regularly operate under government suspicion. State-dominated peace committees slide toward partisanship; CSO-led committees are accused of harbouring ‘sinister agendas to cause a regime change’. The mutual mistrust is not merely unpleasant — it structurally prevents the collaboration that sustainable peacebuilding requires.

Chronic funding shortages trap innovative models in perpetual pilot status. Donor dependency pulls CSOs toward funder priorities and away from genuine community need. The state–civil society disconnect means even when grassroots mechanisms succeed, they cannot connect those successes to national frameworks. And structural and socio-cultural barriers — elitist peacebuilding models, ethnic and class divisions, the digital divide, and pervasive poverty — compound everything.

The central insight: Peace is learned, not just legislated

The most important intellectual contribution of this study is a deceptively simple argument: grassroots innovation and formal institutional support are not alternatives — they need each other.

Community-led peacebuilding works. The “Peace Rabbits Project” in Epworth, the autonomous peace committees in Seke District, and the youth empowerment programmes in Masvingo — these are evidence of what happens when communities are trusted to lead their own peace processes. But without formal recognition, sustainable funding, and genuine state partnership, these successes remain local — and the structural causes of conflict remain unaddressed.

I want to name this as a truth about adult education, too. Transformative learning happens in communities, in informal groups, in circles of dialogue and storytelling. But it needs the recognition, resources, and policy frameworks that allow it to scale, persist, and genuinely change social structures. Informal learning without institutional legitimacy stays invisible. Institutional learning without community grounding stays irrelevant. As we commonly say in adult education, philosophical overtones, "Practice without theory is mere activism; theory without practice is idealism."

 FIG. 4 — THE ADULT EDUCATION CONVERGENCE MODEL OF PEACEBUILDING

What this means for peace education specifically

Peace education has long sat at the intersection of adult education and peacebuilding — and this research enriches both fields simultaneously. Let me draw out four specific implications that deserve sustained attention from adult educators and peace education practitioners.

◆  Peace education must be embedded in community life, not delivered to it. The study’s consistent finding is that externally-designed, top-down peace initiatives underperform against community-led ones. This should prompt peace educators to ask: whose knowledge anchors our curricula? Who designs the learning? Who defines what peace means?

◆     The evidence argues for integrating indigenous knowledge into peace education curricula — not as a cultural footnote, but as a central epistemological resource. Ubuntu philosophy, the Shona restorative tradition, Ndebele spiritual frameworks for healing: these are different from, and in many contexts more effective than, externally imposed models

◆    Youth are not problems to be managed — they are educators in their own right. Youth-led peace programmes are simultaneously peacebuilding interventions and adult education programmes. We should fund and study them as both. 

◆   The study’s warning about evaluation gaps applies directly to peace education. The field needs rigorous, participatory evaluation tools — ones that measure not just outputs, but genuine changes in attitudes, relationships, and community capacity.

Learning points from other scholars

FIG. 5 — LEARNING POINTS: A MODEL FOR PROBLEM-BASED ADULT LEARNING

Source: Fasokun, Katohoire, Oduran (2005:46): The Psychology of Adult Learning in Africa

I am using this model by Fasokun et al. (2005) here to emphasise the embeddedness of adult education in the community and the participatory nature on which it is anchored. Realising this, harvesting the peace dividends in the national peace, reconciliation and healing is critical. Without this informing our national policies on conflict resolution and peacebuilding, the efforts and the huge budgets become just lip service and a robbery of the people, the violence which adult peace education suffers today. Here, the community is the beginning point of inquiry, not even the central focus – if the central focus had to be revealed, it would be the voluntary participation of the members of the community.

The way forward — four recommendations through an adult education lens

The researchers propose four strategic directions. I want to engage with each through the lens of what they mean for adult educators and peace education practitioners specifically.

FIG. 5 — FOUR STRATEGIC RECOMMENDATIONS

Why this matters beyond Zimbabwe

In summary, I believe the broadest significance of this research is not just for Zimbabwe, not just for Africa, but for how the world thinks about peace and how we educate for it.

We live in a moment of proliferating conflict: political polarisation, resurgent nationalism, climate-linked resource competition, global imbalance of power, geopolitical unrest, and the erosion of democratic institutions across many contexts. The standard responses — international mediation, formal transitional justice, donor-funded CSO programmes — are demonstrably insufficient. They treat peace as an event to be achieved rather than a capacity to be built.

What Zimbabwe’s civil society teaches us is that peace is fundamentally a learning process. It is built in the conversations communities have about their shared past. It is practised in dialogue circles where former opponents sit together. It is transmitted across generations through the stories traditional leaders tell and the values they embody. It is scaffolded by peace educators who create conditions for critical reflection, honest encounter, and collaborative action. 

This means that adult education is not peripheral to peacebuilding — it is central to it. And it means that peacebuilding, done well, is always in some sense adult education. At this point, I have genuine admiration for the communities and organisations that continue to build peace in the gaps that institutions leave — and a renewed sense of responsibility, as an adult educator, to make those efforts more visible, more supported, and more sustainable.

SOURCE CITATION

Chijoko, E. M., Mataruse, P. S., & Tagutanazvo, E. (2026). Peacebuilding in Zimbabwe by Civil Society Organisations: New Approaches and Challenges. Kuveza Nekuumba, 5(1), 136–162. 

Fasokun, T.O., Katahoire, A. & Oduran, A.B. (2005). The Psychology of Adult Learning in Africa. Hamburg, Germany: UNESCO Institute for Education and Pearson Education, South Africa