From increasing trust in institutions to providing safe access to water: PBF-supported project results reported in 2024
July 2025
The Peacebuilding Fund is commonly known for its highly flexible and responsive approach, working across thematic areas to fill critical gaps. As a decentralized funding mechanism, the Fund supports integrated analysis, planning and programming across peace and security, human rights, and development pillars, prioritizing holistic responses to sustaining peace needs that leverage the know-how of different partners across and beyond the UN, thus strengthening strategic coherence of interventions. PBF’s support is aligned with national peacebuilding priorities and commitments and requires national ownership to help ensure the most effective peacebuilding interventions.
Due to its pooled nature and support it provides to UN Country Teams and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in more than 70 countries, the PBF is well positioned to showcase results and impact achieved by diverse partners and stakeholders. Since 2022, PBF has commissioned annual aggregation exercises to provide an overview of the PBF’s global impact based on the aggregation of reported results from all active projects a given year. The aggregation exercise is a useful tool to reflect on trends and most common types of interventions and their results, including by PBF focus area. In 2024, 157 ongoing projects across 48 countries and territories reported on their progress, showcasing a wide diversity of peacebuilding initiatives and their results.
According to the PBF’s founding document – its Terms of Reference – the scope of activities that can be supported by the Fund falls into four categories, also known as priority or focus areas.
Implement and sustain peace agreements:
Responses designed to respond to imminent threats to the peace process; and support for the implementation of peace agreements and political dialogue, in particular in relation to strengthening of national institutions and processes set up under those agreements. This includes support for political dialogue, Rule of Law and transitional justice, Security Sector Reform, as well as Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration.
Under this focus area, PBF-supported projects commonly measure the perception of trust of beneficiary community members towards institutions or other communities. Overall, the perceived level of trust in institutions or other communities increased on average by 43.92% across 18 PBF-supported projects in 12 countries that reported on such indicator in 2024.
For example, one project in Niger reported a 21% increase in targeted communities’ confidence in the legitimacy of the State, while in Cameroon one project reported that levels of intergenerational trust in target communities increased by 26% as a result of PBF-supported interventions.
Dialogue and peaceful coexistence:
Activities undertaken to build and/or strengthen national capacities to promote coexistence and peaceful resolution of conflict and to carry out peacebuilding activities. This includes support for peacebuilding programming on national reconciliation, conflict prevention and management, and democratic governance.
The majority of PBF-supported programming falls under this focus area. PBF-funded projects often set up or strengthen peace mechanisms or similar structures to help communities manage conflicts and resolve disputes before they escalate. In 2024, PBF created or supported a total of 1,918 peace mechanisms in 27 countries and recorded the active participation of 357 CSOs and 9,794 people, including 4,445 women and 5,277 young people. For example, in Burkina Faso, one PBF-funded project supported 2,488 adolescents to participate in conflict management networks, and in Mauritania, 50 mouslihs (traditional conciliators) were set up and strengthened in areas of tension to resolve conflicts and promote social cohesion and justice.
Projects often measure the number of disputes or tensions that were managed within conflict governance structures or through mediation. In total, 208 conflicts in nine countries were managed or resolved peacefully through dedicated mechanisms set up or supported by PBF-funded projects, as reported in 2024. Conflicts revolving around land disputes as well as inter-community conflicts were the most recurring among projects, although the highest number of conflicts resolved or managed related to elections-related conflicts or violence. In Mauritania, 50 conflicts, including those concerning early marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), access to civil status and education, were managed through local institutions involving the local communities. In the Central African Republic, 23 disputes or incidents, including those related to gender-based violence, were examined and/or resolved with the participation of ex-combatants. In Sudan, 32 disputes related to natural resource use, access and control were submitted for arbitration and resolved (fully or partially) by local conflict resolution mechanisms or authorities.
Perception of peace was also recorded to assess how people and communities experience changes in peace and conflict management. Projects captured perceptions of decreasing violence, growing feelings of peace within and between communities, and confidence in conflict management approaches. Twelve PBF-funded projects across eight countries reported a 55.12% average increase in people reporting improvement in peace within their communities. For example, one project in the Tanganyika province in the Democratic Republic of Congo reported a 90% increase in respondents affirming that living together and peaceful cohabitation has improved since the implementation of the project in their villages and who noted improvements in how transhumance conflicts were managed. In the department of Péten in Guatemala, one project recorded a 44.07% increase in beneficiaries reporting a positive perception of intercommunity or intercultural dialogues. In Mali, 66% of the target community members indicated a feeling of increased security during the electoral process marking a 10% improvement compared to the baseline.
Peace dividends:
Activities undertaken in support of efforts to revitalize the economy and generate immediate peace dividends for the population at large, including employment generation and provision of equitable access to social services.
Many PBF-commissioned evaluations and reviews highlight that addressing socio-economic needs of communities is key for addressing the root causes of conflict and for sustainably advancing peacebuilding results. PBF-supported programming on peace dividends addresses socioeconomic drivers of conflict supporting marginalized communities as part of larger social cohesion and conflict prevention efforts. In 2024, 80,853 people across 13 countries were reported as beneficiaries of livelihood activities supported by the Fund, including income generating activities, socio-economic empowerment activities, as well as direct financial support and micro-grants, with women, youth and indigenous peoples representing the majority of livelihood support beneficiaries. For instance, 25,944 people declared seeing their revenue increase following one project’s intervention in Sudan, and 1,250 women were enrolled in livelihood programmes in Malawi’s border region. In Burundi, 1,408 women mediators received support to develop businesses based on existing value chains, and 1,110 community members in Chad have improved their well-being thanks to revitalized economic activities. Moreover, eight projects reported a 59.86% average improvement in community livelihoods, whether through an increase in their revenues or through better working conditions. For instance, 90% supported households consider that their income has improved as a result of the project support in Cameroon.
Re-establishing basic services:
Establishment or re-establishment of essential administrative services and related human and technical capacities, including strengthening of essential national state capacity, extension of state authority or local administration, as well as governance of peacebuilding resources. Some PBF-supported projects measure the change in communities’ perception of improvement in basic services, for example, greater or easier access to health services or local governance. In 2024, four projects reported a 49.33% average increase in project beneficiaries’ perception of improvement in basic services. For example, in Peru, 31% of beneficiaries reported an improvement in the justice system promptly initiating investigations of human rights violations.
Prioritizing inclusion:
PBF-supported programmes make significant impact on local communities’ lives, prioritizing inclusion as a cross-cutting approach. In 2024, projects reported that 12,437 returnees and internally displaced persons benefitted from counselling and legal assistance. At least 7,061 refugees, including 2,392 young refugees, are benefiting from access to interim camp services such as accommodation, food, or shelter. Moreover, 5,974 indigenous peoples took part in PBF-funded activities, including income generating activities and those delivering equitable access to agricultural land. 3,675 state officials were involved in training in conflict prevention or mitigation, crime prevention or gender-based violence. 3,170 persons with disabilities took part in training on conflict prevention as well as dialogue engagements, and 165 ex-combatants benefited from access to basic services.
PBF-funded activities also engage civil society organizations (CSOs), including informal groups, cooperatives, and community?based organizations (such as the saving groups in Sudan pooling resources and supporting access to markets and value chain), and even help establish CSOs (such as those in El Salvador that were supported to integrate peacebuilding tools, strategies and training in their work with people in human mobility, with a special focus on women and youth). 5,401 CSOs and 2,193 CSO staff benefitted from PBF-funded activities, specifically from training on conflict prevention, resolution and management, as well as on financial or digital literacy. Importantly, women and youth CSOs were the primary beneficiaries of skills building training opportunities supported by the Fund.
PBF-funded projects place a strong emphasis on promoting women’s and youth participation in project activities and governance structures, such as peace mechanisms and dialogue sessions. The overall participation of women and youth in governance structures increased by 49.27% across 27 PBF-supported projects in 22 countries. One project in South Sudan, for example, reported a 33.5% increase in the proportion of women-held seats among non-state actors’ representatives to constitution-making bodies, while in Madagascar the percentage of youth engaged in conflict prevention and peacebuilding in target localities grew by 44%.
Measuring peacebuilding impact is no easy task, but PBF recipients and partners continue demonstrating year after year how inclusive, context-specific and nationally owned efforts to bring and sustain peace in communities affected by conflict or divisions can make a lasting change. While a small funding mechanism, PBF’s support is instrumental in helping to bring these positive changes around the world. With the world experiencing increasing levels of violence and polarization while facing decreasing funding towards peace and conflict prevention, it is more important than ever to continue measuring and communicating peacebuilding results, with the Peacebuilding Fund making its small contribution through the aggregation exercise.
Global PBF results, as reported in 2024
Disclaimer: This aggregation exercise took into account data reported by projects that were active in 2024, showcasing the impact that these projects have had since their inception and not specifically limited to the 2024 calendar year. Projects also reported only on three indicators per output, hence the aggregated data is not comprehensive of the achievements of all active PBF-funded projects on the select indicators. During the exercise, outlier indicators were detected (i.e., those with significantly higher results reported, namely more than 75% of all reported data for a certain indicator, or those that reported unique types of data). Such outliers were not included into the aggregation calculations as they revealed different data collection approaches and could bias the outcomes. Additionally, perception indicators should be interpreted with caution as they demonstrate average trends but do not represent statistical rigor as methodologies for data collection on communities’ perception largely varies among projects and countries.