Peace & Safety

Message of Peace – Children displaying a banner for peace during a past International Day for Peace celebrations in Kakuma. LWF works with structures such as Peace Clubs (in schools), Community Peace & Safety Teams (CPPTs), Youth Peace Parliament, Joint Peace & Arbitration Committees among others to promote peaceful coexistence among refugees in the camp and the host community. © LWF Kakuma 2015

The LWF Peace & Safety Sector is involved in the promotion of peaceful coexistence and protection from crime. To achieve this, the sector works with elected leaders from all the 12 zones and 131 blocks of Kakuma Refugee Camp, the Department of Refugee Affairs, UNHCR and the Kenya Police. The sector has been involved in community policing and capacity building of leaders, pupils and general community in peace building activities. The key objective of the sector is to ensure that community takes part in the enhancement of its own protection. Some of the community structures established by the sector include the Community Peace & Protection Teams (CPPTs) Joint Peace & Arbitration Committee, the Peace & Security Committee, Peace Education clubs in schools and the Youth Peace Parliament.

The CPPT initiative a Community Policing model which was popularized by LWF in both Kakuma and Dadaab Refugee camps upon realizing that the best way of ensuring peace and safety in the camps was to actively involve the community living therein. Through this initiative, volunteers are competitively recruited per block with the help of block leaders who provide reference checks to confirm that individuals recruited as CPPTs are residents of their respective blocks and have no cases of misconduct. The recruits undergo intensive training to enable them detect and deter cases of insecurity within their blocks, report suspicious characters and activities, basic fire fighting, crowd control, communication among others. LWF provides CPPTs with distinct uniforms for ease of identification by members of the community. There are currently 330 refugee CPPT members in Kakuma who work closely with block leaders and government security organs to maintain peace in the camp.

The sector also supports the Kakuma Youth Peace Parliament that comprises of 85 elected youth representatives from the entire camp and holds its sessions during school holidays. Popularity of the Youth Peace Parliament has spread beyond international borders and this culminated into a historic visit by officials from the Danish Embassy who attended one of the sessions and were impressed by the manner in which the youth were articulating issues affecting their respective parts of the camp.

To ensure that children learn about peace from early beginnings, the sector supports Peace clubs in 17 primary schools and is in the process of establishing others in the 4 remaining schools.

Most of the sector’s funding comes from UNHCR but is complemented by DCA and CoS. The Sector also boasts of 12 case workers and 23 peace education facilitators.