Ivory Coast (with Interpeace and Indigo):

Ivory Coast is a very diverse society, ethnically, religiously, and socially, among others. This diversity enriches and strengthens the Ivorian society but also presents some challenges. While it is one of the most important factors contributing to the country’s development performance, past and current, multicultural and diverse societies can find it harder to cultivate social cohesion, and inter-group tensions can lead inter-communal and political conflict. These fractures have been evident when we look at the electoral violence that Ivory Coast had to grapple with in the past.

Today, the country is painstakingly healing its wounds and addressing its contradictions in order to foster national reconciliation and social cohesion and prevent violent conflict. Although there has been progress in this front, policies and programmes targeting social cohesion and reconciliation still face many challenges and are in need of informed and evidence-based efforts to realise their objectives.

SeeD has been working with its partners, Interpeace and INDIGO to implement several research driven projects types underpinned by the SCORE methodology.

  1. Predictive Analysis of the Social Demand for Islamic Education in Cote d’Ivoire (2019-2020): The SCORE methodology is customised to the Ivorian context towards identifying and assessing educational preferences and needs to inform and optimise the education reforms and educational integration policies together with UNICEF and key national stakeholders and ministries. You can view the report here.
  2. Analysis of the Determinants of Political Violence in Three Districts of Cote d’Ivoire (2020 - 2021): Under EU funding, the SCORE methodology has also being calibrated to identify and understand drivers of political violence to inform policy and programming with robust and scientific evidence, and enhance constructive citizenship in the country (the results can be accessible on the SCORE platform).
  3. Analysis of the Determinants of Political Violence in Eight Districts of Cote d’Ivoire (2022 - 2023): SeeD and its partners are expanding the political violence project to 8 additional districts in the country, making it a total 11 districts out of the 14 in the country to be covered by the project.

Ivory Coast (with Equal Access International):

This project is a part of the Resilience for Peace (R4P), a five-year USAID-funded, Equal Access International-implemented, initiative to strengthen community resilience and learning, particularly for women and youth, to counter and prevent violent extremism in Côte d’Ivoire’s northern border areas. SeeD is developing an Index on Community Resilience against Violent Extremism in Côte d’Ivoire’s northern border areas. This tool will help to understand how communities cope with Violent Extremism threats. The aim is to construct an index of locally perceived risk and its observed effects on social cohesion. The instrument will take the form of a classification of signals observed by the populations. It will allow a bottom-up conceptualization by identifying what citizens identify as markers of risk and the consequences left on social ties within communities. The ambition of the Index is therefore to provide elements of response to enable communities facing the perceived presence of violent extremism groups to maintain their social cohesion. It involves identifying the socioeconomic consequences associated with phenomena related to violent extremist groups and measuring the "traces" left by this presence on horizontal and vertical social cohesion dynamics.