Martha Segura
Colombia

Martha Segura is Executive Director of the Confederación Colombiana de ONG (Colombian Confederation of Non-Governmental Organizations), a network of 1100 NGOs throughout the country. Created in 1989 as a United Nations project, the Confederation is one of several organizations working to coordinate the peace-building efforts of the government, the private sector, international agencies, and NGOs. Ms. Segura has represented the NGO community in peace talks, most significantly as a promoter of the Programmatic Agreement for Peace, signed by the members of the Confederation, international agencies, and the government. Prior to her work with the Confederation, Ms. Segura was an Inter-American Development Bank consultant and worked in several departments of the Colombian government, including the Ministry of Education, the Rural Development Fund, and the Program for State Modernization, where she was responsible for developing labor-adjustment programs for displaced workers. She has been a consultant for the Eje Cafetero Reconstruction Project, based on a new model of alliance and collaborative development between government and civil society that focuses on coalition building, development, reconstruction, and job generation in the coffee region destroyed by an earthquake in January 1999.

Ms. Segura's peace-building activities include:

• building coalitions, partnerships, and networks with local, national, and international organizations, including promoting the Peace Program Agreement with civil society;
• organizing workshops on nonviolence, social justice, democracy, and coalition building, as well as directing meetings and conferences with international agencies such as the World Bank, US Agency for International Development, Swedish Agency of International Cooperation for Development (Asdi), and Iberoamerican Bank;
• organizing gender and conflict workshops to train and teach community leaders on the implementation of UN resolutions, specifically Security Council Resolution 1325;
• coordinating the Capacity Building Project, which was funded by a grant from the community of Madrid, Spain, and supporting other development projects of NGOs working to promote peace in regions of extreme violence;
• organizing a Peace NGO Colloquium where 300 representatives from NGOs discussed their contributions to the peace process; and
• fostering capacity building and strategic alliances by organizing an Internet peace project bank.
  

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