Conflict-Prevention through Protection of Religious Minority Rights for Promoting Peace Tolerance and Equity
Dr. Jahangir Achakzai

Abstract
A project carried out by the EIDHR (European Initiative for Democracy & Human Rights) &WESS (Water, Environment & Sanitation Society) has endeavored to empower the religious minority groups to protect their rights and promote understanding for peace, tolerance, and equity for conflicts preventions. The project intervened through different activities; training programs, workshops, seminars and exposure tours for the empowerment of the minorities’ communities to protect their rights. At the end of the project, an evaluation was sought through this study to assess the interventions of the project in terms of its impact on the beneficiaries. All the stakeholders were taken on board to raise their awareness, particularly raise awareness of the minorities, encouraging them to organize into groups enabling them to protect the violation of their rights. The project endeavored to mobilize the minority communities for socialization with majority population. The assessment results show that the project succeeded in raising the awareness of the minorities as well as of all stakeholders through different training programs, workshops, and seminars. All the training programs, workshops, and seminars were identified as useful in raising the awareness. The stakeholder’s representatives and minorities groups have endorsed the interventions’ usefulness for awareness raising, peace building and conflict management. Almost all the interventions have been applauded by the beneficiaries and stakeholders of the project, however, weaknesses were observed in few areas such as; no practical demonstration of gained knowledge & discipline, no appropriate linkages were developed by the minority communities with organizations of other areas and failure of the minorities into lobbying.

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