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Building peace in South Sudan

Agnes Wasuk Petia will be coming to Canada.

November 27, 2017

By Janice Biehn

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The civil war in South Sudan has ravaged the world’s youngest country, leaving women in its wake. The South Sudan Council of Churches’ National Women’s Program aims to help women recover and realize their capacity to participate in peace building and nation building.

The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund is granting $20,000 towards a KAIROS project that will help women learn to advocate for their rights and the rights of others, with the goal of narrowing the gender gap. “We are adding value to the project already being supported by KAIROS without creating another layer of partner management for the National Women’s Program,” says Naba Gurung, Humanitarian Response Coordinator for PWRDF. An additional Women Link for Peace component of the Action Plan will engage about 50 women from Wau in the troubled Bahr-el-Ghazal region of western South Sudan. These women will be trained and become engaged in peacemaking activities by 2018. They will gain technical skills in how to enact peace and reconciliation work in their communities.


Winnipeg Women’s Resource Centre shines a ray of hope in South Sudan


PWRDF is also sponsoring two three-day workshops in Bor, South Sudan, on the theme of Healing and Rebuilding our Communities (HROC), in partnership with the Episcopal Church of South Sudan, diocese of Bor and the Winnipeg Women’s Resource Centre in Bor. The first workshop will be for married women and the second for men 15 years and older. Eunice Migasia Okwemba, an HROC training facilitator based in Kenya, will facilitate these workshops. In addition to workshops in her home country of Kenya, since 2011 Ms. Okwemba has led HROC trainings in Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. In July 2016 she trained two women from Bor at the HROC International Training in Rwanda.

Agnes Wasuk Petia and Awak Deng will be visiting Ontario and participating in KAIROS’ No Mas II: End Violence Against Women Now! events in Toronto, Kitchener, Waterloo, Thunder Bay and Ottawa between November 24 and December 8. PWRDF’s Executive Director Will Postma will host the November 24 event.