Call for Applications for WROs and YLOs to participate in an Inclusive Peace and Security project in Lebanon

Brief Background and Project Description

Lebanon shares a set of structural barriers to achieving inclusive peace and security. Key among these barriers is the lack of collaboration among women’s rights organizations (WROs) and youth-led organizations/youth-focused organizations (YLOs/YFOs) across dividing lines in the targeted areas; strengthening the linkages between grassroots and national-level WROs and YLOs is essential to ensuring the advancement of inclusive peace and security.

Search for Common Ground (Search)  in implementing  the Inclusive Peace and Security (IPS) project funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), a four-year program, to strengthen women and youth’s meaningful and enduring participation in advancing inclusive peace and security in Lebanon. The IPS project leverages Search’s decade-plus expertise in supporting women and youth’s inherent agency to be positive agents of change in their communities and countries. Recognizing that inclusive peace is mutually reinforced through bottom-up and top-down processes, IPS will amplify the influence of youth and women peacebuilders at the grassroots level, catalyze broad inclusion of grassroots peacebuilders in municipal and national institutions and peace processes, and advance social norms that support the meaningful inclusion of diverse stakeholders in peace and security.

This will be achieved through:

1. Consolidating WRO and YLOs’ strategic engagement and influence in municipal and national peace and reconciliation processes;
2. Motivating (sub)national institutions to strengthen inclusive policies and standards facilitating women and youth’s participation in peace and security processes; and
3. Promoting shifts in social norms around women and youth’s meaningful inclusion in peace and security at all levels.