Conflict Sensitivity Community Hub

Navigating Ethiopia’s Web of Crises: The Role of the Conflict Sensitivity Hub

Fikir Getachew Mekonen

In the volatile borderlands of Ethiopia’s Gambella region, where refugees have sought safety from escalating violence in neighbouring states, a fragile coexistence has repeatedly frayed under mounting pressures.

By late 2025, as over 50,000 new arrivals swelled the already strained camps, tensions between refugees and host communities simmered into open unrest. Repeated incidents of violence escalated dramatically in December 2025, resulting in the killing of Gambella’s police chief and subsequent road closures, and widespread violence in Gambella city, Itang Special Woreda, Abol, and surrounding areas.

Reports documented dozens of civilian deaths, disrupted essential services, imposed curfews, and prompted federal troop deployments to quell the chaos. Amid the bloodshed, misinformation spread rapidly, with inflammatory narratives blaming refugees for local insecurity, land pressures, or resource strain, fueling accusations that refugees were “taking over” or exacerbating ethnic rivalries and prompting official statements from organizations such as the UNHCR and the Ethiopia Human Right Commission.

This cycle of violence is the predictable outcome of interconnected stressors: refugee influxes overwhelming limited resources, historical ethnic fault lines, severe aid cuts slashing rations and services by up to 70% in 2025, and the weaponization of information in polarized environments. Aid distributions, already reduced to half-rations in many camps, became flashpoints when perceived as uneven or insufficient, and as hosts felt marginalized by the “refugee burden”.

Yet, as humanitarian operations halted in parts of the region due to insecurity, the violence underscored how unaddressed resource competition and ethnic undercurrents can transform shared spaces into sites of harm, eroding trust in aid actors and complicating access. Such dynamics are precisely the kind of context the Ethiopia Conflict Sensitivity Hub (ECSH) was created to address.

Launched in June 2025, the Hub exists to equip humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding actors with the analysis, tools, and coordination needed to anticipate these risks and embed conflict sensitivity into every stage of programming and ensure interventions do more good and reduce harm in Ethiopia’s complex web of crises.

The conflict context in Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s conflict ecosystem functions less as a series of discrete crises and more as a dense, interdependent web. Vertically, unresolved contests between federal and regional authorities continue to shape governance and perceptions of exclusion. Horizontally, disputes over territory, administrative power, and local resources proliferate. These dynamics are further compounded by transnational spillovers from neighbouring countries: Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan, as well as the presence of insurgent groups in different parts of the country. In such a system, an intervention in one area or sector inevitably reverberates elsewhere. A peace deal in one region can, and often has, triggered resentment and violence in another. Similarly humanitarian and development interventions have been perceived as legitimizing one actor and altering local power balances and inflaming  disputes and grievances. This dynamic particularly was evident during the northern conflict in Ethiopia, wherein humanitarian organizations were accused of exhibiting favoritism and subsequently faced punitive measures imposed by government authorities. 

For aid actors, this interconnectedness makes operating with a purely sectoral or geographically isolated lens actively dangerous. However, humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding organisations continue to work in silos, which often leads to fragmentation and duplication of efforts and limits the effectiveness of interventions, as seen in the disjointed responses to internal displacement and recurring crises across regions like Tigray and Somali. This is further compounded by the profound changes the international aid landscape is undergoing that are eroding trust in the system. Repeated, and abrupt funding cuts driven by donor-country politics and shifting geopolitical priorities have disrupted long-term programming including health services and left communities exposed.

Agencies in Ethiopia need more support

A recent research conducted by the Hub underscores the scale of the challenge. Of 193 local and international NGOs surveyed, 91% of local and 83 % international organizations reported needing additional conflict sensitivity support, yet nearly two-thirds receive none. This gap represents a collective failure, undermining both the effectiveness and the ethical foundations of humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding work.

It manifests in three persistent ways. First is the analytical gap: the speed and complexity of Ethiopia’s conflict dynamics outpace the capacity of individual organizations to conduct timely, connective analysis. Many operate with outdated or siloed assessments that miss critical linkages between local programming and broader national or regional conflict trends and dynamics. While some organizations do produce strong analyses, these are rarely accessible to the wider humanitarian–development–peace community, limiting their collective utility.

Second is the institutionalization gap. Despite policy commitments and staff awareness, organizations often struggle to translate their principles into daily operational decisions, procurement practices, partnership choices, and monitoring systems. The research highlights that even those with awareness continue to face challenges embedding conflict sensitivity into organizational systems, illustrating that knowledge alone is insufficient without institutional mechanisms to sustain it.

Third is the coordination gap: in a crowded landscape of actors with differing mandates and donors, fragmentation is common, and without trusted spaces for joint analysis and learning, interventions can work at cross-purposes.

The aims of the Ethiopia Conflict Sensitivity Hub

The Ethiopia Conflict Sensitivity Hub has been set up to help bridge these gaps. Its model rests on three interdependent pillars.

The first, research and analysis, aims to provide continuous, operational analysis that connects macro-level political and economic shifts with meso-level institutional behaviour and micro-level community perceptions. By democratizing access to high-quality, connective analysis, we want to  ensure that decisions across the sector are informed by a shared understanding of Ethiopia’s interwoven conflict dynamics and are not seen as merely a box ticking, procedural exercise.

The second pillar, capacity development, targets the knowing-doing divide directly. Conflict sensitivity programming requires specialised skills but cannot be reduced to one-off trainings or checklists. It must be embedded into organizational systems and incentives. We provide trainings, CS reviews, tailored technical assistance, as well as accompany local agencies to help  with the instiutionalization of conflict sensitivity.

The third pillar, convening, addresses fragmentation across the sector. We want to provide a neutral and dedicated platform for dialogue, joint analysis, and problem-solving among international and local NGOs, donors, and academic institutions. In environments where trust is scarce and information is often weaponized, credible spaces for evidence-based conversation are a public good.

Our design reflects lessons learned from conflict sensitivity hubs globally. It is constituted as a consortium implemented by the Rift Valley Institute, Mercy Corps, and Adapt Peacebuilding, linking in depth context analysis, large-scale operational experience, and specialized peacebuilding expertise. Its core funding comes through a multi-donor arrangement involving Global Affairs Canada and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. This structure models the integration across the humanitarian–development–peace nexus that the Hub seeks to promote.

ECSH is part of a slowly growing family of conflict sensitivity hubs, setting itself to contribute insights shaped by Ethiopia’s unique challenges and the tectonic geopolitical shifts taking place. In this sense, Ethiopia is not only a site of urgent need but also a test case for approaches that can inform global practice.

By testing and refining approaches in Ethiopia’s crucible of complexity, the Hub will generate knowledge, tools, and evidence that can inform and strengthen conflict-sensitive practice globally. Its success will be measured not only in the reduced risks and enhanced effectiveness of programming in Ethiopia but also in its contribution to evolving international standards and capabilities.

For the global community of practice, therefore Ethiopia Conflict Sensitivity Hub can serve as a site of significant innovation and learning. It represents an iteration of the conflict sensitivity hub model, that integrated lessons on governance, funding, and mandate with novel approaches to adaptive management and accountability.

The Hub extends an open invitation for collaboration and partnership, aiming to cultivate the entire ecosystem of engagement toward more coherent, accountable, and ultimately, more peaceful outcomes.

Fikir Getachew Mekonen is a research officer with the Ethiopia Conflict Sensitivity Hub. With a background in peace and security studies and experience in qualitative research, dialogue facilitation, and policy engagement, Fikir works at the intersection of humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding practice to promote inclusive, conflict‑sensitive approaches in Ethiopia and beyond. She can be reached at fikir.getachew@riftvalley.net

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