Mid-term Review of the Diakonia Strategic Peace Building ... - Sida

3 R E S U L T S O F T H E E V A L U A T I O N
peace building needed to be carefully assessed and developed. Diakonia outlined
ways of resolving conflict and promoting development around the promotion of dialogue,
mediation and reconciliation, and engaging the people and the State. While this
was a standard academic/intellectual framework, the reality of this practice and implementation
in contemporary Zimbabwe needed to be based on a more careful examination
of available options for conflict prevention. The conflict analysis did not shed
light on these options.
Diakonia and its partners have made considerable efforts, during the conflict analysis
process, and especially since the inception of the new programme in July 2012, to
improve the quality of their risk analysis and management. Partners meet regularly to
share their analyses of potential risks and to develop the strategies aimed at lowering
them. Most of their efforts are geared towards the protection of the integrity of persons,
which is highly relevant in the current context in Zimbabwe, and on the protection
of the documentation of their activities. This part of the risk analysis, including
what it might entail to be involved in peace building activities, and the risk mitigation
strategies put in place by Diakonia and its partners, are of good quality and are far
more advanced than the ones that were in place during the last programme. The revised
risk analysis framework (Risk Register, 21 November 2012) mentions planning
risks and even underlines the potential lack of relevance of the partners’ programmes.
This is a positive development that needs to be highlighted. However, the risk analyses
performed by Diakonia and its partners do not sufficiently address programmatic
risks. There is very little attention, if any, to the effects of potential changes in the
political context on the capacity of the partners to maintain as they are and/or reach
the objectives of their programmes. We will get back to this issue in the section dedicated
to the logic of programming, but this is an area of Diakonia’s work that needs to
be further improved.
The main problem with the conflict analysis is that it partly fails to highlight clear
options for programming for Diakonia. More specifically, there is a gap between the
directions suggested by the conflict analysis and Diakonia’s formulation of its new
programme. The last one and a half pages of the analysis (pointers to programming)
underline four potential strategies:
Need to increase cooperation between CSOs in order to have an influence on
key issues at stake;
Need for CSOs to engage with key/powerful actors;
Need for CSOs to engage with the youth; and
Need to deal with internal divisions/polarisation within civil society in Zimbabwe.
The evaluator is convinced that these potential directions for programming are all
highly relevant, but that they have not yet been fully transformed into clear objectives
in Diakonia’s programme. We will further develop this question in the section dedicated
to the focus of the new programme, but there still is no clear developed strategy
for strengthening democratisation through peace and conflict management or strategic
peace building. This is a complex question and the main challenge faced by Diakonia
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