A Just Future for Malians: towards Better Security, Peace and Justice Systems

Improving security, justice, and peace systems means ensuring they really respond to communities’ needs. People must be at the heart of these systems to make them more effective, open, and accountable. That’s why Cordaid operates at the roots of conflict, injustice, and insecurity.

In Mali, this presents both challenges and opportunities. “The Malian context is characterised by great insecurity,” says Kola Togo, the coordinator of the Just Future programme based in Mali’s capital, Bamako. Since 2012, the West African state has endured a multidimensional crisis that has created scores of (and entrenched existing) obstacles for its citizens who seek access to justice, security, and peace. 

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The Just Future programme seeks to overcome these obstacles by supporting organisations across Mali to address the justice gap from the community to the national level. Fundamentally, these organisations, run by and for Malians, identify opportunities to change how justice is perceived, accessed and obtained in Mali, and much of the programme’s success can be traced back to its bottom-up approach. As Hawa Traoré, one of the leaders of a partner organisation within the Just Future Alliance, summarises, “It’s about putting people at the centre of security and justice issues”. 

The Just Future Alliance

Established in 2021 with Cordaid as the Consortium Lead, the Just Future Alliance is a five-year programme formed of international and local NGOs and civil society organisations. Simply put, the Alliance aims to achieve equitable access to justice for all, people-centred security, inclusive political decision-making, and peace processes in the framework of the rule of law, transparency, and accountability. 

Kola explains how the programme is structured around three distinct yet intersecting pillars: security, justice, and inclusive peace. The objective of the programme is to improve the responsiveness, accountability, and accessibility of each pillar. 

Cordaid supports dozens of civil society organisations in Mali by reporting, planning, and using best practices in their advocacy work. In addition to advocating for people-centred security, our Just Future partners in Mali also work on improving access to justice, thereby ensuring that the people in people-centred security include women, the youth and other marginalised groups, such as displaced people.  

To learn more about the Just Future programme, Cordaid spoke with four members of CSOs partnered with the Alliance. Here’s what they had to say about the programme’s impact on their communities and their country. 

Justice and gender

By incorporating diverse perspectives, particularly by elevating women’s roles in decision-making processes, Cordaid, via the Just Future Alliance, contributes to building security and justice institutions that are more inclusive, responsive, and equitable. 

In Mali, Hawa Traoré demonstrates this diverse perspective well. As the founder of Aprofem, the Association for the Promotion of Women and Children in Mali, her organisation promotes women’s rights in Mali, including the right to health care, access to income, the right to land and the right to live in a healthy environment. 

Without justice, there can be no peace

Aprofem’s projects aim to achieve overall peace in Mali by focusing on improving social justice for women. The organisation’s vision of women fully integrated into Mali’s social fabric as independent citizens requires a level of social change in the conflict-affected country tantamount to transformative social justice. Indeed, as Hawa points out, “without justice, there can be no peace.” 

Reflecting on the programme’s national effects and what that means for her and her colleagues at the organisational level, Hawa says that “working in a programme like Just Future, which helps our country in the process towards stabilisation and the return of peace, is very motivating for us as a civil society organisation.” 

Another benefit of the Just Future Alliance for organisations like Aprofem is the wider access offered by its intra-national partnership network. Hawa notes that “there is no activity at the governorate or regional level where the Just Future partners are not invited.” So, besides improving access to justice for individual citizens, the Alliance helps civil society organisations access resources and connections within the security, justice and peace systems. 

Justice for young people

Another partner from the Just Future Alliance, advocating for the inclusion of women and youth in a people-centred security for Mali, is the Coalition of Alternative Africans and Development (CAD). Of the three Just Future pillars, CAD focuses its work on two: security and inclusive peace.  

For the security pillar, CAD operates in the northern Tombouctou region. Sabane Ibrahim Touré, programme coordinator for CAD Mali, highlights that the security challenges presented by the country’s continuing crisis are particularly acute for Mali’s northern population, hence the focus on Tombouctou. The security pillar is also a priority for CAD in the country’s midlands—the Mopti region. Here, CAD also carries out inclusive peace work.  

Young people in Mali are questioning the authorities about their own involvement in the peace processes.

With their target group of women and youth, CAD supports the two working in synergy. Moreover, CAD bolsters the advocacy actions of these two groups, particularly when their actions demand collaboration with other actors, such as those in defence and security forces. This could occur during projects or advocacy actions that restore trust between said actors.  

Nonetheless, Sabane notes that CAD’s supportive role has changed over time, especially in terms of assisting the youth: “Today, young people are able to carry out advocacy actions without our support.” Of their own volition and on their own terms, Sabane witnesses young people in Mali “questioning the authorities about their own involvement in the peace processes.” 

Sabane emphasises the importance of young people organising themselves, collaborating, and initiating action, for instance, to prevent their peers from being recruited by armed groups, a real danger for communities in the Mopti and Tombouctou regions.  

Reform and rebuilding trust

A climate of mistrust between citizens and officials and between different communities has been a by-product of Mali’s continuing state of insecurity for over a decade. Sekou Kayentao, programme coordinator for Aide Au Developpement Durable (ADD), highlights how timely the Just Future programme is because of this issue: “Mali, since 2012, has been enduring a situation of unprecedented insecurity in which the context is complex and the actors diverse.”  

ADD is a consortium consisting of three Malian NGOs that combined their efforts to operate collectively in the Gao and Tombouctou regions to address the three Just Future pillars. Bringing the population together with security forces in shared dialogue to tackle tensions and suspicions between these two diverse actors is a priority for ADD, explains Boubacar Maiga, who works in monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for ADD. 

A second focal point for the consortium is to bring about greater transparency by following the flow of security reports between police forces and the government and advocating for security sector reform. Committees within the ADD consortium arrange workshops for participants to understand the importance of documenting processes for accessibility. Such approaches speak to the vision of the broader Just Future Alliance to improve access to justice across Mali. 

Inclusive approaches 

Beyond boosting transparency, getting civil society involved in security management is the next step for the consortium. This will enable marginalised groups to access justice in Mali through inclusive peace practices. Sekou highlights how the consortium teaches paralegals to advocate for women, youth, and displaced people as a key strategy for tackling the prevailing climate of mistrust. 

At every meeting, at every committee, we invite young people and women as well as displaced people

“The first plea is advocacy for the specific needs of young people and young people to be taken into account,” says Boubacar. “And that paid off because not only are the municipal mayors now imbued with the specific needs of young people and women, but they are also in the process of integrating this into their development plan. And at every meeting and committee, we invite young people and women as well as displaced people.” 

Boubacar explains that displaced people previously didn’t have a voice in their communities. Now, thanks to the efforts of the ADD consortium, displaced people have been brought into contact with the rest of the community, where they can find allyship and make their unique justice challenges known. 

Justice is both everyone’s right and responsibility 

Sekou believes that Mali’s security issue has reached such a level that “if the military can’t manage, everyone must be involved and contribute to finding sustainable solutions, whether in Gao or Tombouctou, through education, information and awareness-raising projects.”  

Security is not only about the military, civilians have a role to play.

Ultimately, the bottom-up community approach that the Just Future Alliance has taken in Mali has succeeded in diversifying sources of justice for Malians in both theory and practice. By championing people-centred justice, CSOs like Aprofem, CAD and the ADD consortium have helped people realise that, as Boubacar says, “security is not only about the military; civilians have a role to play too.”  

Written by Bryony Harris.

Images: Mickael Franci / Cordaid.