To prevent wars and genocide, cultures of peace must be built. We help to build cultures of peace and foster the education, rehabilitation and community reintegration of children and youth affected by conflict. These are among our critical strategies to end child soldiering.

Lira Palwo Senior Secondary School students in Pader district Northern Uganda perform Bwola dance on 10 September 2010 in UMECS-sponsored Peace Activities Event in which Lira Palwo hosted Sir Samuel Baker School from Gulu in a day of peace drama, debate, poems, songs, music and dance.

The woman elder, tall, dignified and traditionally dressed, had traveled all morning from the village to the secondary school in Gulu where her son attended. She asked to meet with the Head Teacher and was told to wait. In about 20 minutes, she was told to enter the Head Teacher’s office. There, she was offered a chair and sat down. The Head Teacher greeted her and asked what brought her to his school. “I have come to ask you a question,” the mother said with a twinkle in her eye. “What have you done to my child? He no longer misbehaves!” The Head Teacher broke into a broad smile. “You are not the first parent to ask the same question. Perhaps you know the reason? “I think I do,” the mother responded. My son has explained he is part of a new program. I have come to thank you.”

That July conversation is one of many similar such positive encounters that have taken place this past year in seven secondary schools in Northern Uganda. The visitors are some of the parents of the 2,441 students collectively participating in “the program,” in the seven schools. The program is UMECS Peace Education and Guidance & Counseling in Secondary Schools in Northern Uganda.

A Kitgum Alliance student debates Pabo Senior Secondary School team as part of UMECS-sponsored Peace Activities
Event hosted at Pabo, Amuru district on 13th Sept 2010

As we announced last year, in a highly competitive process, UMECS-Uganda won a grant from USAID in Uganda to pilot this program. Chief goals include building a culture of peace to prevent new wars, building peaceful schools and communities, replacing cycles of revenge with reconciliation, and providing guidance and psychosocial needs of children and youth affected by conflict. Uganda has suffered through cycles of war, including the brutal, twenty year war in Northern Uganda that ended in 2006.

After one year of implementation in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Sports, the program has had groundbreaking results: greatly reduced violence, bullying and indiscipline at all seven pilot schools; improved academic performance; engaged students determined to build cultures of peace in their schools, communities and society; transition from punitive to restorative justice at all seven schools; a highly empowered teacher cadre who feel ownership of this program and mandate to prevent new wars; the prominent role of students as peer counselors and peer mediators. 2,441 students and 88 trained teachers are participating in the pilot.

“These results exceed our highest expectations,” notes Charles Onencan, UMECS-Uganda Associate Executive Director and the project’s manager. “We expected substantial results over time, but did not imagine the results would be as transformative as quickly as they have been. Combining guidance and counseling with peace education is one of the reasons for this early success. Training students as peer counselors and peer mediators is another. This has created a unique, innovative model we believe can work anywhere. We think we’re on to something.”

 Ministry of Education and Sports Commissioner George Wirefred Opiro reinforces this premise: “There are significant links between Peace Education and Guidance and Counseling, including the role of peer mediation and acquiring the values, skills and competencies for students and community members to resolve conflicts peacefully through relationship, dialogue and peer counseling.”

Joel Ojok, UMECS-Uganda Counseling and Guidance Program Director agrees. “In transforming students into peacebuilders, guidance and counseling is the key that unlocks doors. Our students have become more open and supportive of each other. They now have more confidence and skills. They can now practice nonviolence. This is why in less than a year, whereas bullying was a serious problem at many of our pilot schools, bullying has practically disappeared.”

Upon winning the grant last year, which follows more than three years of planning the project with partner secondary schools, district leaders and the Ministry of Education and Sports, we familiarized the project with Northern Uganda Acholi sub-region district leaders in Amuru, Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts and selected seven secondary schools to pilot the program: Pabo Senior Secondary School in Amuru; Sir Samuel Baker School, Gulu High School, Gulu College and Sacred Heart Secondary School in Gulu, Kitgum Alliance College in Kitgum and Lira Palwo Senior Secondary School in Pader.

In a collaborative process, we selected 88 secondary school teachers from the seven schools and lecturers from Unyama-National Teachers College for peace education and guidance and counseling training. From 30 November – 21 December 2009, teachers and lecturers participated in certificate level training conducted by Makerere University Institute of Adult and Continuing Education. The trainings were a major experience and built in program ownership and camaraderie with the teachers.

88 teachers and lecturers during their Nov-Dec 2009 certificate level
Training in peace education and guidance and counseling at Gulu College. Makerere University
Institute of Adult and Continuing Education conducted the trainings

 Mr. Michael Obote, a trained guidance counselor at Gulu High School stated on 21 December on the occasion of awarding the certificates: “This has been more than a training we have attained. The opportunity has created a strong bond of brotherhood and sisterhood and created cadres of peacebuilders, guidance and counseling educators throughout Uganda.”

In January, we built a curriculum development team of trained teachers, UMECS staff and expert curriculum developers, including Mr. James Lumoro, Regional Inspector of Schools for Northern Uganda. Two “teacher-owned, student-centered” curricula in peace education and guidance and counseling were developed in time for instructional readiness Copies of each curricula are available on this home page, below, and in our Peace Education section.

A peace education class at Gulu College

The program rolled out in February 2010, during Term 1 at the seven pilot secondary schools. The program components are:

1. Peace Education Classes

2. Student-centered peace activities (peace drama, peace poetry, debates, music, song and dance)

3. Guidance classes (problem solving, decision making, peer counseling, peer mediation, career guidance, relationships, communications, HIV/AIDS, gender equality, et al)

4. Counseling (group and individual)

So what is Peace Education? Ms. Patricia Alum Alice, an economics and geography teacher at Gulu College who teaches peace education to Senior 1 & 2 students says that peace education is understood by her students as “the process of acquiring the values, the knowledge and developing the attitudes, skills and behaviors to live in harmony with oneself, with others, and with the natural environment.”

Commissioner Opiro notes that the major goals of peace education are to build a culture of peace so as to prevent new wars and build peaceful schools and communities.

Ms. Alum expands the role of peace education, indicating that healing and forgiveness are major components of peacebuilding and peace education. “Peace is not possible without forgiveness. The only way our students can learn the habit of forgiveness is by seeing us, their teachers, forgive others and forgive ourselves.” She notes that Martin Luther King once said: “Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.”

Commissioner Opiro affirms that Peace Education “promotes forgiveness as a value and provides the values, skills and competencies to address conflict through dialogue, cultural traditions, relationship building and other nonviolent means.”

Sacred Heart Secondary School students conduct a debate at a 7th July 2010 Peace Activities Event

Student centered peace activities are critical to attaining the goals of the program, such as peace drama, poetry, debates and dance, and permit students to express their understanding and practice of peace through creative expression. Hundreds of these activities in which more than two-thousand students have participated, has helped to transcend peace education from the study of peace to the expression of peace to the practice of peace. Interschool and intra-school events are the most exciting, when students perform before their peers, teachers and community members.

“Students have amazed even themselves with the development of their creative talents to express peace and build cultures of peace,” says Margaret Akech, UMECS Peace Education Coordinator, who works directly with participating schools and teachers to implement the program’s activities.

These activities include UMECS-sponsored Peace Activity Events at each school and multi school events such as have been held in Gulu, Amuru and Pader districts, and in Kampala.

For more information about our program, please download the launch edition of our Journal of Peace Education and Guidance and Counseling by clicking here