| Overview : The Ministry of Civic Education and National Unity is a relatively new Ministry that was instituted in July 2020 by a Presidential proclamation. The Ministry’s main obligation is to create an enabling environment for civic empowerment of citizens and promote sustainable peace and unity for resilience, patriotism, accountable governance for inclusive national development. The mission of the Ministry is to coordinate and regulate civic education services and promote national peace and unity through the enforcement of civic education policies, promotion of civic engagement, shared public interests and values and supporting collaborative peace building and conflict management interventions for national development. The Ministry has two main departments of Civic Education and National Unity. The Ministry of Civic Education and National Unity has, since March 2021, been mandated to implement a Social Cohesion project with technical and financial support from UNDP. The project was previously being managed by the Office of the President and Cabinet since 2012. Through the project, UNDP has been supporting the government of Malawi in establishing a National Peace Architecture (NPA) that aims at institutionalizing the mechanisms for preventing conflict, sustaining peace and social cohesion, and providing a collaborative platform for dialogues. The support provided has culminated into the development and approval of the National Peace Policy in August 2017 which led to the establishment of infrastructures for peace on a pilot basis. So far, six District Peace Committees (DPCs) have been established in conflict hotspots around the country to act as proof of concept of community led peace processes. Additionally, support has been provided to the formulation of a legal framework to establish a National Peace and Unity Commission which shall be an independent pillar for coordination of conflict prevention mechanism, dialogue, mediation, and peace advocacy. A draft bill for the National Peace and Unity Commission has been finalized with the assistance of the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional affairs. It is expected that the bill will be submitted to Parliament this year {2021}. Since the department of National unity is relatively new to managing peace processes and the social cohesion project, it is imperative that a rapid technical capacity assessment is conduced to identify gaps, and develop training materials to ensure the department has the right capacities to advance the on-going work of the National Peace Architecture and setting up the Malawi Peace and Unity Commission once Parliament passes it into law and assented to by the President of the Republic of Malawi. |
