Location: Africa

A training room can look completely safe, and still keep the people in it from saying anything real. Search has learned, across years of running youth programs, that real change doesn’t start with a curriculum. It starts with something harder: helping people feel safe to say what’s actually true for…

Digital violence feels impossible to contain. Harassment, cyberstalking, abuse, and intimidation spread faster than platforms can respond. Young women are the primary targets—and many fear that reporting will lead to blame, humiliation, or indifference. So survivors stay silent. Not because they don’t know how to report. Because they have no…

You might think online harassment is simply the price of being visible. That if you speak up publicly, especially as a young woman, cruelty is just part of the deal. Block the trolls, toughen up, keep going. That’s the advice survivors hear most. But Search for Common Ground knows it…

Most people assume that resentment and distrust carried for decades are too late to heal. Isaac’s pain traced back to 1992, when his parents suffered during a religious conflict in Nigeria. Eighteen years later, his own home was destroyed. By the time he sat down with Search, that history had…

Gatumba, a peri-urban border zone in western Burundi facing the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has suffered recurrent and increasingly destructive flooding for the past decade. These shocks have disrupted livelihoods, housing, schooling and social cohesion. While the whole community is affected, the impacts are deeply gendered and generational. Drawing…

Most people think that once two communities see each other as enemies, that’s the story for good. That competition over scarce resources hardens into something dialogue can manage but never actually change. You keep the peace between them. You don’t expect them to start working together. Search for Common Ground…

Gatumba, a flood-prone peri-urban border zone in western Burundi facing the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has endured recurrent and increasingly destructive flooding for the past decade. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in 2025 and 2026, this brief examines how climate change interacts with governance, land politics and regional conflict —…

Most people assume peacebuilding looks like a peace process. A negotiating table. A dialogue session. A formal intervention. Search has learned that in many parts of the world, the most powerful peacebuilding looks nothing like that. Sometimes it looks like a hit TV show. After decades of working in Nigeria,…

Most people assume that some communities are too divided ever truly to come together. That certain rifts—religious, ethnic, historical—run too deep. That the best you can hope for is a kind of managed coexistence. Two groups, side by side, never really seeing each other. Search has learned otherwise. After four…

Most people treat climate change and conflict as separate problems. One is an environmental crisis. The other is a human one. They get different budgets, different departments, different solutions. But in the communities Search for Common Ground works in, they arrive together. Climate shocks deepen inequality, strain shared resources, and…