Initiative Africa officially launched the ‘Business for Peace Fellowship’ with eight fellows who have taken part in the First Cohort of the program. The three-month fellowship program was designed to introduce business owners, business advisors as well as business aspirants to the various peacebuilding approaches and the analytical tools they will use to understand, analyze and resolve conflicts.

The program is deemed to be instrumental in allowing the business community to have a say in peacebuilding activities and in fostering local ownership. The seminars of the First Cohort Fellowship Programs have been implemented in partnership with the Institute of Security Studies
(ISS). Fellows have taken various seminars on such topics as conflict, violence, peace and business leadership, the economic cost of conflict, and doing ethical business as well as other supplementary workshops meant to boost fellows’ media and communications skills. The Fellows also had a field visit to Arba Minch where they participated in a seminar held with Gamo elders who shared their traditional conflict resolution mechanisms followed by visits to Dorze village, Crocodile Ranch, and the 40 Springs. The visit afforded fellows to get insights into the practical application and importance of knowledge and practices of customary institutions in conflict resolution and transformation

Initiative Africa (IA) organized a workshop and invited participants from the private sector to contemplate its potential role in the upcoming National Dialogue (ND). The private sector should understand its role as well as its own capacity and seize the moment to invest in the National Dialogue (ND) knowing that its outcome (whatever it might be) would anyway affect the sector. Thus the support and investment in the process of ND are tantamount to an insurance v that would avertthe risks and tradeoffs the ND might entail.

The National Dialogue (ND) must be approached with an outcome in mind that would determine its objectives and what to do to meet the objectives. There might be various possible scenarios as potential outcomes of the ND; however, whatever the outcome might look like, weneed to approach the ND as a cultural moment for us Ethiopians to learn the culture of dialogue rather than to resort to machineguns to solve our political differences