Commonwealth Professional Fellowship

May 7, 2015 | The Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR), Coventry University, England
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The CTPSR has launched a six week ‘Improving Natural Resource Governance through Citizen Engagement’ fellowship programme (planned for mid-September to end-October 2015) for civil society actors in Commonwealth African countries as follows:

The “Improving Natural Resource Governance through Citizen Engagement” fellowship programme has two key objectives. First, it aims to help improve the knowledge and skills of civil society fellows in engaging in natural resource management, thereby empowering them to contribute to poverty reduction and peacebuilding in their home countries. Second, it aims to disseminate the civil society fellows’ achievements and challenges in engaging with the issues around natural resource-based development, and hence to create synergies with the CTPSR and its networks for future cooperation.

The programme responds to the development and peacebuilding needs of natural resource endowed countries, especially in East African countries where there have been recent discoveries of oil resources. While the natural resource sector can be a catalyst for development, unequal distribution of socio-economic and environmental impacts from the sector often leads to tension and conflict in society.

The CTPSR has a unique position to design and offer this highly inter-disciplinary fellowship programme. The CTPSR draws on Coventry’s historical heritage in peace and reconciliation to provide teaching, training and research in peacebuilding and social relations. It also works with other University departments, including the renowned Centre for Agroecology and Water Resilience (CAWR) located at Garden Organic, the Geography, Environment and Disaster Management (GED) department which teaches popular oil, gas and environment courses, as well as with external networks in the UK. In addition, the centre has strong links with universities, civil society actors and regional federations in East Africa.

The fellowship programme will combine a variety of workshops, seminars and field trips over a period of six weeks. It uses reflective learning process throughout the programme. Learning journals and weekly reflection sessions with programme mentors will be used to develop action plans and ideas for their organisations and communities, and for future collaboration with the new networks at the end of the programme. It focuses on three specific themes of (1) sustainable use of resources, community engagement and local governance; (2) conservation and national level governance; and (3) sustainable development, conflict prevention and global perspectives, as well as offering professional training activities on equality and diversity, media relations, communication and intercultural dialogue, advocacy and participatory research.

For further details and application, please go to: http://cscuk.dfid.gov.uk/apply/eas/applicants/professional-fellowships/

The deadline for applications is 10 May 2015. The evaluation committee would select six successful fellows and transfer the whole programme to the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission to assess whether they would fund this programme. We are optimistic that this is an exciting programme worth funding.