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To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence? By Piera Freccero

Introduction In this essay I am going to analyze the role of vocational or business trainings delivered to voluntarily repatriated Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Kosovo. I will look at the potentialities and the weaknesses of these educational programmes in relation to the reconciliation and pacification needs within a post ethnic conflict context.

This paper will draw on my experience in Kosovo in 2005 as Income Generation Activities (IGA) Officer working for an Italian Non Governmental Organization (NGO) that was in charge of the repatriation of some Gorani families from Serbia to their villages of origin in the municipality of Dragash, Kosovo.

I will start by describing how are vocational trainings and IGAs conceptualized by the International Organizations and NGOs in the context of the relocation of refugees or IDPs. Then I will provide a brief account of the context, the role of Gorani within the conflict, the education system in Kosovo and an overview about the NGO project and how it was affected by a narrow vision provided in the donors guidelines. Lastly, I will argue that is highly important, upon a careful reading of the socio-economic context that led to the conflict, to expand the vision of the scope of theses educational activities form a merely functional one (improve peoples income only) to a more transformative one, utilizing a conflict-sensitive lens while planning and implementing the trainings management, curriculum and pedagogy.

Considering the importance and the conflict around the use of language and especially names of localities in this area of the world, it is worth spending few lines to justify the use of names in the essay. The country will be named Kosovo, and not Kosova as Albanians name it, because the former is considered to be the English name of the country. For the topographic names I will use the Albanian terms for simplicity and not to display any favouritism.

The International Community vision of IDPs Sustainable Return According to UNHCRs (2004b) definition, Internally Displaced People (IDPs) are:

Persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border. It is important to notice that this is a descriptive definition (UNHCR, 2004b) as it does not define a legal status, as in the case of refugees1. However the international community (IC) recognizes the need for assistance and protection of IDPs. UNHCR in its Voluntary repatriation: International Protection (1996) establishes the conditions under which IDPs can return to their places of origin. Summarizing, the return has to take place under condition of: legal safety (freedom from persecution, recognition of property rights, etc); physical safety (freedom of movement, freedom from attacks) and material safety (access to basic services such as education and health and means for income generation). Regarding material safety, the use of tools such as vocational training to enhance the waged employment possibilities and business and skills training to empower self-employment economic activities, often accompanied by various micro-finance assistance, are widely recognized as effective tools to promote a lasting a sustainable return (DRC 2008, UNHCR 2004b, ILO 2006).

The mentioned sources recognize that education that fosters employment and income is crucial in order to allow returnees self-sufficiency and independence from external aid; it is also essential in order to regain self-confidence after times of insecurity and displacement and in empowering and rebuilding social networks. I will argue that, under certain circumstances, the scope of these educational activities should be expanded to include a clear conflict resolution focus.

Gorani and the conflict Gorani are a small ethnic Muslim Slavic minority living in the south of Balkans in an area called by them Gora (that means mountain in Gorani language) located between Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia. In Kosovo they live mainly within the commune of Dragash, prevalently in mono-ethnic villages making up almost 30% of the municipal population (Cocozzelli 2008). Even if Gorani political representatives have been supporting Serbian government before and during the conflict (ibid.) no major violent conflicts between them and Albanians have been reported in the aftermath of the war. However after the withdrawal of the Serbian troops as a consequence of the NATO bombing in 1999, many Gorani2 moved to Serbia in fear for their safety but also as a response to the progressively stagnation of the

Kosovo has been internationally considered as a territorial part of Serbia until its declaration of independence in 2008. Therefore Gorani families that moved into Serbia during and after the conflict were internationally considered IDPs and not refugees. 2 Its difficult to establish a number, given that before the conflict some of them were classified as Muslim Slavs (therefore together with Bosniaks), other as Serbs or Albanians (REF)

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

economy in the area. Kosovo has always been the most economically underdeveloped region of former Yugoslavia (Sommers and Buckland 2004), and the area of Dragash has been characterized, especially after the war, by an almost nonexistent local economy (UNHCR 2004a). Economic reasons have been at the base of Gorani mobility over the regional borders in the last centuries. According to UNHCR (2004a) and my direct experience, most of the voluntary returnees decided - once ensured about the reestablishment of basic safety conditions in the area and encouraged by the benefits they would have enjoyed by joining the return programmes - to return to Kosovo because of the deteriorating economic conditions they were living in Serbia. The returnees within the programme I worked in were all living in Beograd before the return, in a condition of hardship, perceived as mountaineers by the people of the city and performing occasional jobs mainly as street sellers.

Education in Kosovo conflict Even if in this paper we will be focusing on adult informal education, it is important to stress that formal education had a central role in Kosovos conflict (Sommers and Buckland 2004). In the country there are always been parallel education systems, utilized to reinforce ethnic identities, and when Milosevick made the Kosovar-Albanian education system illegal, the Albanians created an underground self financed system that was a very strong symbolic form of resistance to the Serbian rule (Williams 2005). After the war, the parallel system with separated ethnic curricula was rebuilt by the UN without using a conflict sensitive approach (Smith 2005, Williams 2005, Sommers and Buckland 2004). Very interestingly as there was no clear policy of the UN and later of the government of Kosovo, there is still an open conflict over the language of instruction (Gorani dialect or Bosniak) and the curriculum (the translated Kosovari Albanian curriculum or the Serbian one) that should be taught in the schools for Gorani minority in Dragash3 (Cocozzelli 2008). Needless to say this still creates high political conflicts.

According to Kosovos Ministry of Education (2008) in 2004 in Dragash there was one school with mixed language teaching (the only secondary school in the main city), 19 school with Albanian curriculum and language of instruction and 16 Gorani schools.

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

The project UNMIK4, with the Provisional Government of Kosovo, have given a high priority to the return of all the ethnic minorities that flee the country Serbs, Bosniaks, Roma, Gorani, and others - as a condition for the reconciliation and stabilization process in the area. Therefore the government installed a significant amount of money, channelled through UNDP that allocated it to various NGOs, for the Government assistance to Returns (GAR) project. UNDP promoted a methodology, that was agreed within the IOs and shared with the national and local authorities, that foresaw the implementation of clusters of activities: preliminary identification visits abroad, return and reconstruction of the houses, infrastructures to the hosting villages, psycho-social/reconciliation activities (usually with the establishment of community centres) and then economic assistance through IGA trainings and grant provision5. The project in which I was involved, implemented by the International Consortium for Solidarity (ICS)
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followed these guidelines. The IGA activities were implemented one

year after the return of the families. The design of the trainings included an improve your business training that would have led to the definition of a business plan that would have allowed the access to an in-kind grant to start up the activities, along with a long term technical support in the field of agriculture/husbandry and commerce. Every family was entitled to one grant, but the educational support was open to any returnee who would want to join. The returnees would have had a privileged access to micro-credit once their activities would have started.

Education in the IGA The methodology proposed by UNDP proposed a model whereby no specific reconciliation objectives were directly linked with the IGA trainings, as there was already the psycho-social sector taking care of this aspect. By looking at how the educational part of the project was implemented I will instead argue that a self-conscious and systematic (Bush and Santarelli 2000) effort to include peace-building objectives within the educational component would have been more effective. The grass roots, participatory approach of project staff and the small scale of the intervention partially compensated for this limit. I will analyze the potential or actual positive impact of the educational path as designed and implemented during the project under three points of view: the training management, the curriculum and the pedagogy.
In June 1999, following a 78 day-long NATO campaign, the United Nations was tasked to govern Kosovo through its Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).
5
6 4

http://www.ks.undp.org/?cid=2,3,74

an Italian NGO specialized in humanitarian assistance in the Balkans and Middle East. ICS was present in Dragash area since before the conflict, as it has been assisting the exodus of the Kosovar Albanians in Albania during the NATO bombing and their return in Kosovo at the end of the war.

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

a. Management The devolution of management decisions to the community of returnees and the hosting community, and the culturally and ethnically mixed composition of the staff represented a first important step towards the construction of a new dialogue and a sense of mutual recognition between ethnic groups (Oh and Van Der Stouwe 2008)..

The management of the trainings was highly participatory at many levels. There were constant consultation with local authorities and an open dialogue with the returnees families and the other villagers. The methodology was shared with the families since the preliminary visits in Serbia. Given the small scale of the project and the grass roots organizational culture of the NGOs involved, it was possible to adjust continuously the schedule, content and arrangements of the trainings according to suggestions that were raised during the trainings, the villages management meetings and the individual meetings with the families. ICS was working in collaboration with a local NGO, Meshtekna, based in Dragash, specialized in rural development and micro-finance. The composition of the organization reflected the ethnic composition of the commune but the senior staffs that were supporting the planning and implementation of the trainings were mainly Albanians. The involvement of this organization was openly discussed and accepted by returnees families, community and authorities. ICS staff was ethnically mixed, there were Albanians, Gorani and Kosovo

Turkish, as well as Italians and Bosnians.

b. Curriculum As previously mentioned only one objective, peoples employability or livelihoods, informed the content of curriculum. However, when working with adults that have been exposed to a number of difficult and traumatic experiences that shaped their own ethnic identity, in a postethnic violence context, another important educational objective has to be to alter the rules of interaction (Bush and Santarelli 2000) with other ethnicities. This has shown to be

essential for two reasons: one because it will enhance peoples capacity of doing business, given the predominance of ethnic Albanians in the local markets it was crucial for Gorani not to have a discriminatory perception towards them and not to be discriminated by them in order to build safe and healthy economic networks. In addition to that, the prevention of ethnic violence is good per se, as it is the right to live a pacific coexistence and its centrality has to reflect in all the actions taken. To neglect conflict in such an environment would mean lo leave space for dangerous misinterpretation or tensions. Looking at the curriculum through a conflict-sensitive lens will help in shaping the pedagogy and the contents (ex: are there

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

any stereotypes about the economic roles and ethnicity?) (Bush and Santarelli 2000, Tawil and Harley, 2004).

c. Pedagogy We already mentioned that the selected teachers/facilitators were Albanians, members of the same small community7.The language of instruction utilized was the language called SerbCroat before the conflict, which was also the language of communication between Gorani and Albanians before the conflict. While most Albanians could speak some Serb-Croat, very impressively almost no Gorani could speak Albanian. Albanian language courses were organized under the psycho-social activities part of the project, but they were mainly followed by the young components of the returnees families and very rarely by the adults that were attending the IGA trainings. This is a clear example of the limits of the objectives that informed the curriculum planning.

Even if a strong gender lens was utilized in the selection of the beneficiaries, indeed a high number of returnees were female headed households, the same attention was not given when planning the IGA trainings. However, the dynamics of exclusion and evident disparities in the literacy levels between man and women were so evident in the classroom, that there was an immediate reaction by the project staff. A different curriculum was necessary and the women expressed the will of learning separately, and this was arranged with the provision of a female Gorani teacher that was selected within the community and trained ad hoc.

A quite impressive amount of aggressiveness among the students was happening in class. This was certainly the result of the violence and hardships that the returnees had to face in the last years. Similar behaviours were also present in the local community at large since most of the Albanians living in the area have been forced into mass-evacuation during NATO bombing (Roth et al 2006). A flourishing illegal market of psychotropic drugs made things even more complicated. The problem was recognized but, rather than facing it with a specific action, such as training in conflict resolutions or similar included in the curriculum since the beginning, it was faced trying to propose different models of dealing with conflicts, creating spaces for discussions in groups but also at the individual level. This had the shape of a mentoring process and was particularly successful in building trust and positive relations particularly in the assistance for their business phase.

It might be interesting to stress that the main facilitators were schooled within the Serbian system and went to the university in Beograd. Their common experiences as immigrants played a positive role in the creation of mutual trust.

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

Lastly, in order to make the returnees business projects feasible a solution had to be found in order to overcome the limited perception of freedom of movement that they felt. They had no limitations within their villages (that are mono-ethnic) or within the communes, where the coexistence with the Albanians was somehow peaceful. However none of them would accept to go to the largest city, Prizren, as they felt vulnerable and not free to speak their language or Serb-Croat. Obviously this was a challenge also for their reintegration. The project management then tried to facilitate the creation of business ties between the returnees and some (Albanian) business providers in Prizren. This happened first with a series of group visits, then with the encouragement of keeping the ties within the mentoring process. Extending the returnees economic network was certainly one of the most efficacious tools to rebuild the relations between the two ethnic groups. Pedagogy was the field were, to my advice, the experience of the staff could better compensate the methodological limits of the intervention.

The risks within IGA trainings There are a number of ways in which IGA training might instead foster conflict and violence. Mainly this can happen if there is not enough attention to the inequalities that these programmes can create and the stereotypes that they can promote.

In terms of inequalities, given the short term nature of the funding for these kinds of activities and the fact that these funding are used to target individuals rather than communities, there is a very high risk of privileging few and leaving others frustrated. In Dragash, Albanians were as well returnees as they all have been displaced to refugee camps in Albania during the bombing. They came back as winners and they benefitted from the UNMIK national rebuilding plan. However the context of massive scarcity of resources of Dragash could very easily lead to conflicts. It is very important to promote economic activities which are not overlapping or competing too aggressively with the activities already present in the territory. In the case of the returnees in our project they all proposed to offer services that did not exist anymore in their villages (blacksmith, carpentry, masonry and small agriculture and husbandry) and this seemed to avoid any conflict. On the other hand only few returnees could benefit from the education and the grants, while the majority of the residing population benefited only of the infrastructures build by the project.

In terms of stereotypes it is important to analyze the economic relations and the use of resources before the ethnic conflict and understand how they contributed to the ethnic tension. In Dragash there were no tensions over natural or economic resources, rather there

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

were problems between Albanian population and those Gorani that were covering political or controlling roles (police). A stronger awareness of the tensions over inequalities and conflicts should have been promoted in all the stages of the project (Oh and Van Der Stouwe 2008).

Conclusions As we have seen, the implementation of IGA trainings for returnees offers a range of actions that can help overcome ethnic violence creating an environment of pacific coexistence. Some of these tools were used in the project but the most important one, use a conflictsensitive lens to plan and implement the curriculum and the pedagogy of the course, was missed. This was mainly due to the compartmentalization of the project led by donor funds. The division of the psycho- social part from the education part is not advisable. There must be a high degree of exchange and integration of the two components in order to make sure that reconciliation objectives are at the core of the education and economic development planning.

Moreover, schools are not islands. Ethnical separation was at the base of the agreements for the end of the war in Kosovo, or as said by Davis integration was not in the agenda (Davies 2004:165), as in other countries in the Balkans. This did affect formal and non formal schooling systems (Hromadzic 2008, UNESCO 2011: 170). Therefore in this context education policy makers and implementers, can probably have only limited results as educating children and adults separately according to ethnicity, religion or nation is highly unlikely to foster familiarity and tolerance and far more likely to foster suspicion and cement divisions (Davies 2001). In addition to that, the expansion of the scope of IGA trainings as a strategy for ethnic reintegration of Gorani returnees was possible because of the mild nature of the conflict between them and Albanians and because of the grass root approach of the NGO that allowed the necessary degree of flexibility and learning by doing that major donor projects wont allow. A completely different strategy would have been needed in other contexts, as in the case of other returning minorities, as Serbs, that are still forced to live in enclaves under the armed protection of international military forces.

To what extent can Income Generation Activities Trainings help overcome violence?

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UNHCR, 2004a. Update on the Kosovo Roma, Ashkaelia, Egyptian, Serb, Bosniak, Gorani and Albanian communities in a minority situation. Available at: http://www.unhcr.se/Pdf/protect/Kosovo_minorities_June.pdf [accessed 27 March 2011] UNHCR, 2004b. Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. Available at: http://www.unhcr.org/cgibin/texis/vtx/search?page=search&docid=43ce1cff2&query=guiding%20principles%20on%20 internal%20displacement [accessed 27 March 2011] UNHCR, 2010. Inter-Agency Standing Committee, Handbook for the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons, June 2010, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4790cbc02.html [accessed 27 March 2011] Williams, J.H. 2005. What to do with a troublesome context? A Review of Parallel Worlds: Rebuilding the Education System in Kosovo & Learning Independence: Education in Emergency and Transition in Timor-Leste since 1999. Comparative Education Review 49, 262-270

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