Join us for the San Francisco Net Tuesday on September 9:
Involver: How Nonprofits Can Create Video Campaigns for Social Networks.
While citizens can donate to conflict relief organizations such as CARE International, they have few if any formal opportunities to help support post-conflict transformation and peace building. assetmap.org/uganda will utilize digital mapping tools to improve collaboration, best practice sharing, and funding coordination by American citizen efforts to support community development in post-conflict northern Uganda. It is the first project of assetmap.org, a tool that will help citizen global change agents better share their knowledge and resources for collaborative development. Since 1986, Ugandans have been caught in a vicious war between the Government of Uganda (GoU) and the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). Subject to village raids and child abductions by the LRA, forced into ill-provisioned, ill-protected displacement camps by the GoU, the people of the Acholi, Teso, and Langi tribes have been caught in what UN officials have called the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Despite this horrible situation, Western humanitarianism has provided resources that have helped many community-based organizations (CBOs) grow into effective organizations and support an increasingly robust civil society. As peace talks help end the war, this civil society will be an essential foundation for a peaceful, democratic society. As peace comes, however, the relief organizations that provided the financial support for northern Uganda civil society will move on to other pressing global crisis, leaving a financial vacuum that threatens to undermine local community leadership in development and conflict transformation. American citizens have a unique role to play in supporting this transition. Citizen-led projects including Rotary International club trips, university study abroad programs, and youth-led service projects have created a flow of resources and collaboration between American and Ugandan communities. These groups do not face the institutional imperative to jump from crisis to crisis, and through collaboration could provide more sustainable resources to support the development of post-conflict civil society. Unfortunately, these groups have no mechanism for learning about one another, the fundamental prerequisite for collaboration. New groups, inspired by their examples, have no mechanism for channeling their new resources to existing endeavors. Digital mapping tools can fundamentally change the way that Americans support post-conflict transformation in Uganda