At the beginning of March, John Rogers was back in Uganda for another week-long Residency and with another group of students studying for the MA in Christian Organisational Leadership that DAI runs in partnership with Uganda Christian University.

This time, John was facilitating the “Conflict” course – not one in how to create conflict – our leaders taking the course rarely have the need for any training in that! This course is on “Conflict Management and Transformation”. Over the last few months, John has been preparing new Residency materials to go alongside the major revision of the course manual which was finalised last year.

Taking the “Conflict Management and Transformation” course was a group of 27 leaders, in their second year of the MA course. Interestingly, although the majority of the participants were Ugandan, there were also two from Kenya and one each from South Sudan, Ethiopia and Zambia. The group included church leaders from a variety of churches in Africa but also participants from the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, the International Justice Mission, the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the Ugandan Electoral Commission and the Ugandan Judiciary which gives a flavour of the mix of leaders in this year group. Describing the group, John said:

“they were extremely articulate, engaged and involved in their learning; it was a great group to be working with”

The Residency, introduced different approaches to conflict, explored how conflict can escalate and how it can be de-escalated and gave the participants tools so they could mediate conflict between conflict parties in the future. Probably the highlight for many of the participants was that each of them had an opportunity on the final morning to role-play the mediation of a conflict with the requirement to identify the main issues between the parties.

The participants responded very positively to their experience of the course. Daniel said:

“The Residency gave me a good sense of the importance of the movement from the management, to the resolution, and to the transformation of a conflict. I think our Residencies should really seek to highlight the key aspects of a course and invite us to explore deeper just like this one did. I am now able to help someone see what is the escalating conflict, and its source so that we can begin the journey of de-escalating it.”

Richard commented:

“John provided us with a very conducive learning environment and there was great interaction between the students as well as with the facilitator.  I really enjoyed the part of demonstrating and trying to resolve conflict.  Now I feel I am well equipped to be a mediator in conflicts!”