Women Peace Makers (known as WPM) began as a youth and women-led peacebuilding network in 2000 comprising of mostly female university students who were particularly concerned about conflict and violence against women in their communities.

In 2003, WPM formally registered as a non-profit and non-governmental organisation in Cambodia and began to focus its efforts on empowering women, youth, and communities to address conflict non-violently and to stand up for women’s rights through community mobilisation, awareness-raising, and capacity building on issues related to women’s rights protection and conflict transformation. WPM works very closely with communities across the country; including minority groups, on issues on women, girls, and conflict. WPM has thus established its long-term commitment, skills, experience, and relationship in the community it serves. Over the past two years, the Organisation has initiated, piloted and evolved its localised information gathering methodology called Facilitative Listening Design (FLD), to better understand difficult and sensitive topics directly from the perspectives of communities and bring their voices to target audiences for uptake.

FLD has been tested in sensitive contexts including negative-sentiment against ethnic groups, perceptions of #the Other# along with border areas, and understanding perspectives from adolescent girls in minority groups. The learning from FLD continues to inform interventions and WPM’s direction in addressing a wide range of issues. WPM is grounded in its approach and community voices inform all of its continued learning and strategic direction. At the national level, WPM serves as a steering committee member of the Gender and Development Network (GADNet), a network of 43 NGOs and individuals working on gender and development throughout the country. It is also an active member of The Cambodian NGOs Committee on Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (NGO-CEDAW), and of the United Nations Youth Advisory Panel (UNYAP).

Our united voices project empowers women facing intersectionality of issues through sharing existing strengths and knowledge for better access to employment and inclusion in an urban society.

The project intends to use an innovative method of:

• Learning by listening;
• Sharing
• Speaking together; bringing marginalised women together around common issues.

Women from four communities: a) Indigenous women, b) Women with disabilities, c) Rural-to-urban migrant women, and d) Women facing abuse are empowered to learn more about their own communities, be better equipped to represent each other, recognise the diverse voices inside their communities, and widen communication across many layers of identity that are found in each community.

The women come together to share their knowledge, teach each other skills and mechanisms that they are using already, sharing both their challenges and resilience in the face of conflict, violence, discrimination and negative sentiment. The ultimate objective of this 12 months project is to explore tools that assist marginalised women to transform conflict in their lives and their communities, through sharing existing strength and knowledge, including those that provide better access to employment and inclusion in an urban society.