NGOs pledge to build peaceful digital society

Ayo Ajayi in Abuja

Search for Common Ground, SFCG, in partnership with other well meaning Civil society organizations across the country have reiterate their commitment in training and educating Nigerians to understand how to use the digital space to build peace in the society.

The organizations made the call recently in Abuja, during the three days workshop tag “building peaceful digital societies” Organize by Search for Common Ground (SFCG).

Search for Common Ground, SFCG, is an international NGO that is specifically focused on peacebuilding, which works to end violent conflict in Nigeria was established in the year 2004 in Nigeria.

Meanwhile in a sideline interview with Thisday, the Regional Program Manager, West Africa Bryan Weiner said, “our focus is specifically on building peace, bringing people together, moving away from adversarial approaches and towards collaborative solutions.

” We are working on a number of different issues in Nigeria preventing violent extremism, Farmer herder dialogue, social cohesion in humanitarian settings, inter religious dialogue.”

He added that, ” Search for Common Ground has always been very involved with the media, radio and television from our early days. But now, the digital space is where a lot of the conflict takes place. So we’ve got a new initiative at Search for Common Ground really looking at digital peacebuilding and how we can use digital tools to bring people together to build peace, because we know that’s malicious actors out there using these digital tools to fuel and drive conflict.

” we have build projects around rumor management, hate speech management, big project around COVID where we were talking about debunking rumors online. And now we’re doing a number of projects monitoring for hate speech around elections. So we’ve entered in this partnership with meta last year with the idea of partnering with the organization and especially around civil society, partners in country building , building their capacity both in digital media literacy, as well as peacebuilding so that they can use their voice and they can use this platform to build peace”. He stated.

The three days training also tailored towards introducing the participants to Common ground approach and as well as digital peacebuilding modules to enhance their activities in addressing violent conflict, especially on the online space.

Also speaking during the workshop, Fatima Madaki the head of national projects, Search for Common Ground, said fake news being circulated on social media in most cases constitute some of the vices in the society.

She added that, ” The organisation is working with team of young ones who are tech savvy and some of them are professional already. The idea is also to provide linkages between these organizations to share their experiences and further expand their network while they work together.

” We’re hoping that with the 2023 elections coming up, you’ll see a lot of peace messages, churned out by this young people and civil society organizations present here to change and shift the perception the dynamic that is tilting towards violence. She said.