When you hear the term Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI), what comes to your mind? Do you wonder how peace became an ‘everyday’ thing? Do you imagine, like most people, that peace is a static condition or an absence of violence - that it is not something you would measure ‘every single day’? If you are thinking along these lines, we are delighted to share a rather different way of understanding and building peace at the community level.

The Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) methodology is a locally led approach to the design and assessment (i.e. Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning, or MEL) of peacebuilding initiatives. Instead of external ‘experts’ defining what peace means to communities, community members visualise and determine the indicators that they then use to understand and measure peace in their everyday lives.

As a community-driven approach, it advocates that local communities affected by conflict or threats to their physical and emotional wellbeing know best what works for them, and what doesn’t. They are also first-hand observers of the incremental changes that are contributing to peace in their community, and therefore should be the primary informers for the design and implementation of peacebuilding initiatives.

EPI methodology was first developed by Roger Mac Ginty and Pamina Firchow, who outlined four key steps: 1) development of EPIs; 2) verification of EPIs; 3) design of interventions based on these EPIs; and 4) periodic surveys to note any changes in people’s perceptions of peace.

At HIVE Pakistan, we support marginalised communities through the ‘Community Innovation Lab’ [1] (2023-2024), which fosters grassroots peacebuilding initiatives across the country. We’ve worked with our local partners to use EPI methodology in six projects. As an organisation, this allowed us to understand unique peace indicators to design more impactful and contextually relevant peacebuilding interventions alongside them. Our local partners implemented EPIs in the following manner.

First, local partners held a baseline focus group discussion with community members before designing an intervention, in order to understand the community’s unique EPIs.

During the intervention, a community focal person and our team jointly maintained a community diary, in which we recorded daily insights and learnings from candid conversations with the community members.

Community Learning Diary- Sani Safe for Peace

An everyday learning diary to note everyday observations, maintained in local urdu language by one the community focal person, Ustaad Iqbal (Project: Sani-Safe for Peace) (Photo taken by Maria Patel, project lead)

After the intervention, our local partner held another focus group discussion to measure not just whether it had contributed to peace in line with the community-defined EPIs, but also whether there had been any changes in the community’s understanding of peace.

For HIVE and our local partners, the EPI approach positively impacted our peacebuilding work. We were able to generate and understand some unique EPIs for each community. Further, the methodology’s key values helped us in further improving the design and implementation of on-ground projects in several ways:

  • By putting the community members at the forefront of defining their unique indicators of peace, it calls for a shift in the power towards the local communities, which is traditionally seen in the hands of the external funders, external experts or evaluators.
  • By including the diverse range of community stakeholders in the conversations and acknowledging their daily lived experiences instead of imposing alien or contextually irrelevant understandings of peace and wellbeing, it promotes inclusive and community-centred approaches to peacebuilding.
  • This approach values the richness of human emotions and stories and moves beyond reliance on purely quantitative metrics to measure impact. Moreover, the daily open and candid communication strengthens relationships with the communities and ensures their lived experiences remain central to the process.
  • As it embodies a decolonial lens, it challenges the ‘technocratic turn’[2] still very much in practice in the peacebuilding sector, which focuses on a standard set of inflexible indicators that are often unrepresentative of local community voices. Through its bottom-up community-led approach and emphasis on nuanced signs of peace, it calls for organisations to ‘go the extra mile’ to capture the community stories and indicators in depth.
  • Community-defined indicators of peace are dynamic, deeply contextual, and reflective of lived experiences, shifting with changing circumstances and challenges. Recognising and valuing these localised indicators is essential for communities and stakeholders to learn better and design more relevant and impactful interventions that meaningfully address their needs and aspirations.

For example, during our exploration of EPIs, we observed that community-defined peace indicators frequently shift based on contextual dynamics. For instance, in Jaranwala, Punjab, the Christian community initially emphasised financial stability, youth employment and non-discrimination as their top everyday peace indicators. But, following a mob attack,[3] they instead prioritised safety from majority-group violence, psychosocial healing, and non-discriminatory behaviours as their EPIs.

Moreover, we observed multiple indicators coexisting and varying across individuals; for example, a Christian girl in Peshawar defined peace as both avoiding harassment and achieving financial independence, while a Hazara student linked peace to being able to afford hostel dues in the new city and enjoying home-cooked meals.

  • Through the process of collective knowledge generation, we discovered how collaboration among individuals deepens understanding and enhances problem-solving. This approach highlights how diverse perspectives contribute to shared wisdom; by combining insights, the collective effort surpasses individual limitations, leading to more resilient and well-informed solutions.
  • Moreover, the EPI method provides a holistic approach to peace and a deeper, more connected dive into rich community stories and wisdom by prioritising meaningful engagement and enabling a richer appreciation of cultural and social dynamics.
  • Unlike traditional methods, the EPI approach emphasises collective capacity building and shared learning between the MEL team and communities. This reciprocal process fosters meaningful insights for addressing challenges and achieving sustainable outcomes. For instance, by documenting community members' narratives in a learning diary, we observed their growing engagement and emotional depth in updates. Simultaneously, we realized this iterative method provided richer, more nuanced insights compared to static tools like one-off interviews or surveys, enhancing mutual understanding and the quality of our work.

Case study: ‘Sani-Safe for Peace’

One of our Community Innovation Lab partners, Maria Patel, led an impactful project in Islamabad’s Khushab Basti, a displaced community affected by climate living in an informal settlement, focusing on peacebuilding and gender-sensitive solutions. Recognising the severe lack of sanitation facilities, which led to issues like poor health, restricted mobility, and compromised safety for women, she installed two prefabricated communal washrooms.

Maria engaged the community through a baseline group discussion to identify key challenges. Over the next month, she maintained a community diary, documenting emotions, morale, and critical insights such as:

  • Sanitation’s role in restoring dignity
  • Improved mobility fostering community interactions
  • Ensured sense of safety of women and young girls
  • Women’s active involvement in identifying and sustaining solutions
  • Minimised health risks
  • Improved comfort to perform religious practices

In the end-line focus group discussion, some key insights from the community were as follows:

A new mother commented, “I have a small child and my husband has mobility issues. Having this bathroom empowered me”.

Another middle-aged woman expressed her gratitude when she talked about her teenage daughter, “Yesterday, for the first time, I didn’t accompany my daughter (age 14) to the bathroom, she went herself”.

Reflecting on her observations, Maria Patel, the project lead for Sani-safe for Peace, shared, “Whenever I visited the community, they would ask if I’d like water or tea. But yesterday, they asked, ‘Would you like tea or use the bathroom?’ It showed me how much pride they take in having proper washrooms now. It’s something they value so deeply that they want to offer it to guests.” This shift reflects the community’s newfound dignity and ownership over the facility.

During an endline focus group discussion with local community women of Khushab Basti, Islamabad led by project lead Maria Patel (Project: Sani-Safe for Peace) (Photo taken by Mariyum Areeb Amjad, Program Officer, HIVE)

During an endline focus group discussion with local community women of Khushab Basti, Islamabad led by project lead Maria Patel (Project: Sani-Safe for Peace) (Photo taken by Mariyum Areeb Amjad, Program Officer, HIVE).

Key learnings from implementing the EPI approach in communities

  1. Deep insights through qualitative methods
    Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) practitioners can uncover profound qualitative insights through direct engagement and observation. Field notes and conversations often provide a deeper understanding of community dynamics compared to structured surveys.
  2. Context-specific approaches
    In settings like Pakistan, individuals are more expressive in conversations but hesitant about written surveys or notes. This hesitancy often stems from low literacy levels, making informal and interactive methods more effective in capturing authentic feedback.
  3. Enhanced community ownership
    When community members define their peace indicators, they exhibit greater involvement and motivation. This participatory approach fosters a strong sense of ownership and shifts decision-making power to the community, creating a more empowering and inclusive process for peacebuilding work.
  4. Dynamic tracking of peace indicators
    The EPI approach enables practitioners to observe how peace indicators within a community evolve daily. This dynamic perspective ensures that interventions remain responsive and aligned with the community’s changing realities.
  5. Reduced practitioner bias
    By focusing on community-defined priorities and indicators, the EPI approach minimises the assumptions and biases of MEL practitioners. This allows a more authentic understanding of on-ground realities and builds stronger relationships between practitioners and communities.

Get in touch with HIVE to learn more about their experience embedding the EPI methodology into their work: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hivepakistan/

[1] Powered by HIVE Pakistan, Community Innovation Lab (CIL) is a collaborative action-learning space that examines, incubates, and catalyses innovative solutions to complex social problems. It was formally launched in February, 2023 to oversee the Local Action Fund (LAF) by Peace Direct in Pakistan.

[2] Roger Mac Ginty, Indicators+: A proposal for everyday peace indicators, Evaluation and Program Planning, Volume 36, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 56-63, ISSN 0149-7189, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2012.07.001.

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149718912000602)

[3] Jaranwala is a Christian informal settlement in Punjab province of Pakistan that was subject to a mob-attack in August, 2023 which resulted in the burning of over 100 houses and several churches.