Exchanging Weapons for Development in Mali: Weapons collection programmes assessed by local people.

Since United Nations Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali first coined the term"micro-disarmament"in the mid -1990s, international efforts to reduce the availability of small arms and light weapons have only begun to approach a comprehension of the human costs of the problem and the optimal means of curtailing it. Because of these weapons' devastating effects on people's livelihoods and on communities' abilities to build peace and pursue development, durable solutions to curbing the problem are urgently needed. Increasingly, the international community has favoured weapon collection programmes as a means of alleviating the world's most conflict embroiled regions of the tools used to perpetuate armed violence. These approaches to the problem have aimed to encourage communities plagued by violence to hand in their guns, sometimes offering them individual incentives or community-based development projects in exchange for their arms. Some important lessons have already been realised from these endeavours. But there remains much more to learn. For example, we must ask which types of projects actually have identifiable and lasting effects in eliminating guns from local communities. Furthermore, it is imperative to know which arrangements and incentives work best in promoting the surrender of weapons, and in providing local people a sense of ownership in their own future development. It is in this context that i am pleased to introduce the present UNIDIR study, based on research in Mali. The research represents an important step forward for past evaluative attempts, applying innovative field techniques that place local people at the centre of the weapon collection review process. The participatory techniques developed in the study offer new lessons for effective implementation and measuring the success of weapon collection initiatives, directly as observed by the local people who are in the best position to evaluate the effects of the projects on their own lives.