• Peacebuilding and reconstruction

Peacebuilding and reconstruction

Young women are not only combatants in contemporary African wars, they also participate in a whole array of different roles. By and large, though they remain invisible in these contexts to northern policy makers and NGOs. This policy dialogue argues that to improve policy and programming efforts it is necessary to broaden the understanding of young women’s roles and participation in armed conflict in Africa historically and today. The intention is to provide policy makers and aid practitioners with a state-of-the-art overview of the situation for young women in African war and post-war situations.

Issues of stigma, safe demobilization, and individual concerns about post-war marriage, health and education need to be addressed both in a more gendered way, and with an appropriate understanding of young women’s agency in both peace and war. This document focuses on issues around abduction, voluntary conscription, women as a labour force in rebel movements, disarmament and demobilisation of female fights, and how to rebuild their lives once there is peace.

The paper concludes that opportunities to support gender equality in many post-conflict situations have not been seized. Traditional gender stereotypes and divisions of labour have instead often been reintroduced, and sometimes even reinforced by DDR programmes. There may be various reasons for this and it may take different expressions. For example, it appears that young female fighters have at times been denied access to official DDR processes because the international community does not recognise them as real fighters.

The report recommends:

• acknowledging young women as actors in war: practitioners in the field, including INGOs, NGOs, UN agencies and international aid donors should always assume that young women are involved in active warfare as fighters in contemporary conflicts in Africa

• humanitarian assistance and DDR programmes must support gender equality: humanitarian assistance and DDR programmes for ex-fighters must seize the opportunity to support gender equality and always to administer their programmes in a gender-sensitive way; otherwise these interventions may risk exacerbating or reintroducing gender inequalities

• programmes must understand and connect to the local context: local and context-specific knowledge of the conflict and its actors is imperative when DDR programmes are planned and implemented. Young women’s experiences in fighting forces may vary significantly depending on various factors such as type of conflict, mode of conscription and women’s roles and status positions within the armed group
  

• sexual abuse, trauma, and stigma: it should be acknowledged that sexual exploitation and abuse are experienced by many young women in fighting forces. It is important to understand local concepts of rape and sexual stigma to address these issues adequately on the ground

• young women’s productive labour: it should not be assumed that the principal reason for the abduction of young women into fighting forces is to keep them as ‘sex slaves’. Women’s productive labour in the context of fighting forces has received too little attention. Rebel movements in Africa need women and children to maintain their ‘war system’ and abduct them for this reason.

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