Women Peacemakers Launch National Network to Resolve Community Conflicts Across South Afri

PRETORIA, August 12, 2026. Seventy years after women marched to the Union Buildings to protest pass laws, and days before what would have been the one hundred and first birthday of Mama Gertrude Shope, South African women mediators gathered to turn decades of quiet community peacebuilding into a formal national network with the reach to shape how conflicts are prevented and resolved across the country and the continent.

The Gertrude Shope Women Mediators Network held its General Assembly Meeting at the Department of International Relations and Co-operation headquarters, bringing together government officials and civil society organisations to build the operational foundations of an initiative that touches the daily lives of communities navigating tension, elections and local disputes. Convenors were deliberate about the timing, positioning the Assembly as the moment when historical commemoration becomes a living mechanism for peace rather than a calendar observance.

The network’s roots go back to 2015, when the Gertrude Shope Annual Dialogue Forum launched with backing from DIRCO, the Departments of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, Defence, and civil society partners. Over the past decade, more than a thousand women have been trained in mediation. Their work spans two distinct but connected arenas: international peacekeeping deployments and domestic peace tables, including election observation efforts. That breadth matters. It means the network can address conflict at the neighbourhood level and at the regional negotiating table, often drawing on the same pool of practitioners.

The proposed governance structure reflects that ambition. An Assembly will serve as the primary decision-making body, supported by a steering committee and co-chairs drawn from both government and civil society. DIRCO will house the secretariat. Membership carries no fee and is open to trained mediators, practitioners, academics, traditional leaders and community peacebuilders, a deliberate design choice that keeps the network accessible to the widest possible range of people doing this work.

Meanwhile, the network’s international standing is consolidating. It has already been recognised by FemWise-Africa as South Africa’s chapter, and formal recognition from the Southern African Development Community as a national chapter is expected before the end of August 2026.

During discussions, members drew a distinction worth holding onto. The network, they noted, already exists in the everyday work women do in their communities. Formalisation does not create new activity. It provides structure, identity, credibility and continuity for work that has long been happening without institutional backing. The mandate is clear: promote meaningful participation of women in conflict prevention, management, resolution and peacebuilding at local, national, regional and continental levels. Success, members agreed, is not measured by counting women but by assessing the leadership they exercise.

ACCORD, a conflict resolution organisation that participated in the first African Union training for women mediators, has supported this journey from its early stages. The organisation brings continental experience to the network’s development and has committed to continuing that support through capacity building, partnership and documentation of practice, ensuring that the expertise of South African women mediators reaches the spaces where decisions about peace are actually made.

The question the network now faces is one of translation: how the credibility built in community halls and at local peace tables converts into sustained influence at regional and continental levels, and whether the governance structures agreed upon in Pretoria prove durable enough to carry that weight.