act for peace works with partners to prevent and resolve conflicts with a range of peace-building and human security programs, including:

·         Land mine and unexploded ordinance (UXO) clearing in Cambodia, which were placed there over a period of 30 years during armed conflict. Professional teams including local village people are very effectively removing the UXOs. Schools and communal areas have priority. This program was favourably assessed by the AusAID Evaluation Team last year.

·         Providing ongoing support in Sudan to people returning home, to internally displaced people and to host communities.

·         Employing human rights field-based researchers, conducting workshops among Burmese refugees on the Thai Burma Border and assisting them in documenting and responding to human rights abuses.

·         Training in human rights, trauma counseling, and gender development in Indonesia. The work also provides opportunities for advocacy and networking among Non Government Organisations and volunteers in Indonesia.

·         Human rights, peace and reconciliation, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS work throughout Asia and Africa with regional and international partners, including the World Council of Churches.

·         Peace and reconciliation efforts in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka through regional workshops, seminars, and “peace nurseries”.

·         “Just Peace” programs in Fiji focusing on the pursuit of social justice through economic justice, faith and society, peace, social empowerment and youth training.

·         Educating and empowering women in the Philippines to provide skills in rural development, the strengthening of civil society, and in advocacy for their basic rights in Philippine society.

·         Jointly funding a meeting between church leaders in West Papua and the President of Indonesia. The aims of setting up the dialogue are to restore mutual confidence between West Papuan society and the government and recommence work towards realising Papua Special Autonomy.

act for peace in conjunction with our partner, the Near East Christian Committee for Refugees (NECC-ICC) is committed to the ongoing struggle of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of occupation, and all the conflict and retaliatory actions by both sides, people simply trying to raise their families need help with the basic humanitarian need for clean water. Obtaining and having access to clean water is a major concern for people living in the Occupied Territories and the NECC-ICC has been busy designing a program that provides this basic service.

The West Bank in the Holy Land is near the Jordan River and faces continuing problems in obtaining adequate supplies of fresh clean water. Water in the Jordan River is under the control of Israel. This has been the case since occupation began in 1967. The annual flow of water in the Jordan River has dramatically deteriorated over the last few decades. This situation has been due to the Israeli diversion of water projects. These projects take 60% of the river flow.

The main source of water now comes from aquifers tapping into underground water. However Israeli wells tap deeper into them than Palestinian ones are permitted to, so the Israeli pumping capacity is eight times as powerful.

The solution is to harvest rainwater. Our partners are building new cisterns, as no permits are needed. Rain is now harvested from home rooftops for domestic use, and from small catchments providing supplementary irrigation for agriculture.

In conjunction with the Palestinian Water Authority the NECC-ICC is carefully targeting areas of greatest need. It also invests in giving families the skills they require to manage water usage and ensure that sanitation, principally through proper septic tanks, will not taint water in the new cisterns.

 

For more about our work to prevent and resolve conflicts, click on the icons below.

    Refugees         Philippines            Burma                Sudan