Midlands Peacebuilding and Community Development Forum (MPCDF) is a women and youth serving community based organization that was formed in May 2018. The organization operates in the midlands province and it works largely with young people.
Envisioning human rights and fundamental freedoms for all are its ethics, MPCDF has quite a number of programs that support human rights and encourage young people to participate in the political and developmental processes of their respective communities. The peace education program is centered on democracy education, conflict resolution which focuses on the social-behavioral symptoms of conflict, training individuals to resolve inter-personal disputes through techniques of negotiation and (peer) mediation and raising awareness of human rights with the aim of engendering a commitment among participants to a vision of structural peace in which all individual members of the human ethic group and race can exercise their personal freedoms and be legally protected from violence, oppression and indignity . It seeks to improve communication through skills such as listening, turn-taking, identifying needs, and separating facts from emotions.
The organization also have the active citizenship program with components like capacity building, youth-led social action project, policy dialogues, developing networks and conducting interface meetings with responsible personals. It seeks to promote and encourage citizens and policy makers to engage and deliberate on pertinent issues prevailing in the local community, including especially vulnerable groups like the youth, women and the disabled to voice their concerns in development matters in Zimbabwe.
The program on women, peace and security contributes towards gender mainstreaming, debate and policy development in the field of women, gender, peace and security and in so-doing enhances the dialogue around women’s effective participation in peace and security in the midlands province, protection in time of conflict and recognition in the post-conflict phase. The program also sought to include men in the empowerment of women, emancipate young women from the cycle of gender based violence, abuse, exploitation and discrimination.
The organization conducts activities like youth leadership training workshops, community meetings, meet the candidate electoral debates, road shows and community outreaches to activate and motivate youth to participate in governance processes. Currently MPCDF is in the process of encouraging the midlands people to inspect the voters roll to check if details are correct and mobilizing them to register with the biometric voter registration to those who are not registered.
MPCDF seeks to promote and encourage citizens and policy makers to engage and deliberate on pertinent issues prevailing in the local community, including especially vulnerable groups like the youth, women and the disabled to voice their concerns in development matters.
Target beneficiaries
The target beneficiaries of the organization are young women and men between the ages of 16 and 35 years residing in the midlands province.