Strategic Area:                             Crisis Prevention and Recovery

Alignment with strategic plan:        Crisis Prevention and Recovery

Project Name:                                      Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR)

Duration:                                       2006 - 2009


Project Summary:
The Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration project is part of the Rule of Law and Security strategy and aims at strengthening security and improving reallocation of government funds to productive sectors through demobilization and reintegration of security forces and militia. The project also includes support to small arms and light weapons control through institutional strengthening, advocacy and community led initiatives. In the first phase (2003 – 2005), the DDR project focused on registration of armed forces and piloted a DDR initiative for 512 free lance militias from all the 16 districts of Mogadishu. As far as small arms are concerned, the first phase focused on an assessment of small arms and development of draft legislation. In the second phase (2006 – 2009), more emphasis is put on a larger scale DDR based on security sector reform and small arms registration and licensing. 
Expected outputs of the project are:

•    Sustainable disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-militias
•    Forces (army, police, custodial corps) reduced within the framework of a security sector reform  
•    Small Arms and Light Weapons controlled through institutional strengthening, advocacy and community led initiatives

Key achievements:
In order to foster DDR, the project has supported: (i) Storage and control of tens of thousands of automatic weapons in all parts of Somalia, including through DDR, rehabilitation of armories, legislation and the training of security force personnel (ii) : Medical screening of individuals and psycho social assistance to around 400 affected persons and rehabilitation of psychiatric hospital and training of hospital staff, (iii) 773 individuals have benefited from DDR in 2007 through provision of micro grants, business training and on-the-job vocational training (iv) screening and selection of next caseload of around 1000 individuals completed in 2007 for reintegration support to start in 2008.

The small arms control component of the project has focused on control rather than collection through a participatory, community based approach which has led to a fruitful peace building dialogue and the registration and licensing of 1500 civilian held weapons (pilots started in Boroma and Hargeisa). This participatory, community based strategy is to be adopted incrementally to the rest of the country. In addition, the project has trained armory keepers and rehabilitated armories throughout Somalia in 2006/7.