Accompanying the “Dialogues Centrafricains” initiative

29/10/2021

Groupe URD is providing support for the launch of the ‘Dialogues centrafricains’ process, which aims to develop national analysis mechanisms. Several workshops will be organised in November with different Central African institutions, such as universities and civil society organisations, and meetings will be organised with different partners in order to establish the foundations of a project to create an analysis institute in CAR.

Reconciling the nation through debate

The Central African Republic has a chronic lack of quality data which would help to nourish and take the heat out of the essential dialogue that needs to take place between citizens. The objective of this initiative is to renew dialogue, make society less conflictual, and re-establish confidence and credibility, by facilitating debate between politicians, academics, field practitioners, and Central African civil society, including youth, and the most vulnerable and marginalised people.

On the strength of our experience facilitating dialogue between actors, we will be contributing to this original, ambitious and useful initiative that aims to ‘inform decision-making through knowledge and dialogue’. The initiative will accompany rather than take the place of local actors who are faced with major challenges for which they will need to think ‘out of the box’.

We will be conducting a field visit in November in order to:

meet Central African institutions, such as universities and civil society organisations, to review current dialogue mechanisms and to validate the next steps;
give a foretaste of the kind of dialogue that the project wants to promote, by organising two inter-actor debates : one on climatic questions and the other on issues specific to youth (citizen-based action, youth and art, and youth and employment);
meet potential partners to work with in the future.

The first steps of the ‘Project to support strategic reflection and inclusive dialogue in the Central African Republic’

This is the start-up phase of a process which, in time, will help to establish multi-actor dialogue about the development and recovery challenges facing the country.
In a deteriorated political context, the aim of the ‘Project to support strategic reflection and inclusive dialogue in the Central African Republic’, via ‘Dialogues centrafricains’, is to promote discussion and information exchange, re-establish confidence between civil society and institutions, identify solutions to improve people’s living conditions and set up a permanent mechanism to facilitate thematic dialogue at the national level.