Gender, HIV/AIDS and Conflict Resolution

Mainstreaming is a strategy for addressing crosscutting issues. It involves identifying crosscutting issues that are central to policy development, research, advocacy, and PPME.  The major crosscutting issues identified so far as such by ASE are gender, HIV/AIDS and conflict management.

Gender issues are deep-rooted in the cultural and traditional practices of the communities. And these cultural and traditional practices, by and large, have made it virtually impossible for women to fully exercise their human rights and meet all their practical and strategic needs. Fortunately, nonetheless, the Ethiopian Government is committed to reversing this situation by attaining the MDGs, which provide for the elimination of all gender-based discrimination. ASE believes that it and the Government must concert their efforts in this regard for an obvious reason.

As in many other developing countries, in Ethiopia, too, HIV/AIDS is no longer just a health problem, but also a developmental challenge. Aware of that, the Ethiopian Government has come up with a policy and a multi-sectoral strategy for combating the pandemic. ASE has noticed that HIV/AIDS has been spreading like wildfire in its intervention areas, mainly because such undesirable practices as alcohol abuse, polygamy and unsafe sexual intercourse are rampant. ASE believes that harmful traditional practices like cutting tonsils, extracting teeth and tattooing are making their own contributions to the spread of the pandemic, since the so-called traditional healers use blades and needles (often repeatedly) to render their “services”.

ASE has been implementing a conflict prevention and resolution programme in conflict-prone areas—mainly in the weredas that are adjacent to both SNNPR and Oromia. ASE’s aim in this is, of course, promoting peace and stability—in the absence of which development is unthinkable.

Conflicts arise for various reasons. For instance, the stakeholders’ analysis has disclosed that the young generation, which is rapidly growing in number, often gets into conflicts with the Government because of land distributions. In and around ASE’s intervention areas, occasional conflicts flare up between those who like to see their area further urbanised and those who prefer tilling the land. ASE is also led to believe that wherever there is a development intervention, there is bound to be some kind of conflict. The degree of such a conflict might be too low to be considered a cause for concern initially. If not resolved right away, or nipped in the bud, nevertheless, it could eventually get out of control. Development interventions, at times, bring a bonanza to one group of people, in the form of a better access to scarce resources, and leave another group to be just spectators. Such a situation, of course, is a recipe for a serious conflict between groups of people. A case in point is the development of an irrigation facility. This usually is a cause of conflict between those who live upstream and those who live downstream. So it is imperative that it be handled with care. Also, making an area free of the tsetse fly and malaria lures a large number of people to move into that area and settle down. The resources management in the area will, however, inevitably entail some kind of conflict. Most importantly, the fact that ASE’s main strategy is building independent rural institutions (CBIs) is in and of itself a cause for concern. Why? Because ASE anticipates conflicts among the members of the institutions, between the leadership of the CBIs and ASE’s staff, or between the CBIs and the local government, even between the CBIs and other social organisations. ASE, therefore, considers conflict resolution to be one of the crosscutting issues of its interventions.