PeaceFem App: Our latest contribution to peacetech in use all over the world

At Inclusive Peace, we generate knowledge products designed to be used by practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. We do so in new and innovative ways, and in our collaboration with partners on the PeaceFem app, we are inspiring peacemakers across the globe.

Who is still in doubt? The future is female – including in peacemaking. However, women’s achievements in peace and political reform processes are often invisible or understated. Inclusive Peace, in collaboration with UN Women, the Monash University Gender, Peace and Security Centre, and PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform at the University of Edinburgh, created an app to highlight female peacemaker’s strategies to influence peace processes as well as the provisions created in agreements and the level of their implementation. We pooled our data in one easy-to-use app, now available in English, Arabic, French and Indonesian. The app is designed to inspire current and future peacemakers and is now in use in more than sixty countries across the globe.

The PeaceFem app was launched in July 2020 and has now been downloaded in over 60 countries, by users from Sweden to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan to Austria. The App has been updated for 2023, with additional case studies and languages that will expand the app’s reach and accessibility among WPS actors in even more regions around the world.

What’s new in Version 2?

  • Additional case studies on women’s involvement and gender perspectives in peace processes in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Tunisia
  • New full translations into French and Indonesian, alongside English and Arabic
  • Technical improvements to improve user experience

“Women’s participation in and influence on peace processes is essential to inclusive societies, but we have a lot of work to do in making this work visible and accessible for other advocates around the globe. With the PeaceFem app, we hope to inspire and spark women’s participation in peace and political reform processes,” says Sarah Taylor, Director, International Policy Strategy and WPS, at Inclusive Peace.

The app contains a comprehensive index sorted by region, country, strategies, provisions, and implementation providing information about strategies women groups and their supporters have used to influence peace agreements. These strategies are often creative and sometimes surprising. In Somalia, for example, milk collection collectives were key in building trans-clan alliances between women involved in the peace process following the civil war. And in post-apartheid South Africa, there was a significant number of strong feminist leaders involved in political parties and civil society.

“Despite the attention generated by the 20th anniversary of UNSCR1325, it seems like the WPS agenda at large, including ideas on strategies for advancing women’s meaningful women’s inclusion in peace processes and political transitions, is currently stuck, much likemost of the world’s track 1 peace processes. Women can play an important role to revitalize and rethink processes.The updated version of the PeaceFem app – with new case studies and now available in more languages – provides free access to the tools, experiences, and insights of fellow WPS practitioners that can help users to think about strategies that can get gender responsive provisions into peace agreements, and also advance the WPS agenda more broadly,” says Thania Paffenholz, Executive Director at Inclusive Peace.

Download the PeaceFem app on iTunes or Google Play.

monash-university-logo
un-women