Since 2023, delegates from Cameroon and other conflict regions in Africa have gathered with grassroots peace-builders from all over the globe in order to pave new pathways towards justice and peace in Cameroon and communities throughout Africa. Together, they have co-created safe spaces to discuss grievances, undo layers of colonialism and inequality, and weed out seeds of distrust, fear, and hostility.

Delegates learn skills and tools for healing and connecting across divisions, which they bring back to their communities to sustain and expand on these new pathways to justice and peace. These programs also serve as the entry points for “Peace Hubs” across Africa. These hubs continue the process of connecting, healing, reconciliation, and transformation, using the skills the delegates learn at the conference.

The vision of the IJPC is to restore, repair, and sustain the social fabric, so that justice, unity, and peace will prevail from within Cameroon and other African communities, and real independence will manifest. We, the organizers of the IJPC, seek to move people beyond divisions of ethnicity, language, and other divides to a common ground of shared humanity. We aim to support them in healing from the past that affects their present, freeing them to redefine the future they want.

The IJPC is a locally-driven gathering for learning, sharing, and healing, based on a model that has been successfully used in other African communities to prevent violence and create reconciliation after conflict. Delegates come from a diverse cross-section of Cameroon and other conflict regions across Africa, including French and English-speaking Cameroonians, citizens and leaders of peace organizations, victims of violence, youth and adults, and different genders.

They are supported by training teams that brings decades of collective social justice and peace-building experience from countries and communities that are heavily impacted by the effects of colonialism. The trainers are specifically chosen for their facilitation approach, one which is based on the trust that Cameroonians and other Africans caught in violence have the capacity and wisdom to engage with and transform their own challenges. The trainers’ role is to support and invest in that transformation, by placing themselves in spaces with the people, not over them, and facilitating delegates’ inner and collective healing. That human connection then becomes the basis for delegates to learn how to work communally for justice and peace in their home communities.

IJPC trainer Samuel Odhiambo has been coordinating the Mukuru (2nd largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya) peace clubs for youth. These clubs were instrumental in contributing to peace before, during and after the recent elections. By contrast, other slums in Nairobi had violent conflicts characterized by loss of lives, destruction of property and displacements. Sam has also been a trainer in the Cross Border Peace Initiative in Northern Kenya empowering the Turkanas (a pastoralist community) to transcend life-long enmity and embrace peace with the Nyang’atom from Ethiopia. In these communities, guns were replaced with connection, following a series of trainings in 2020 and 2021. These are just two examples from one IJPC trainer – the training team has many more.