Sif Heide-Ottosen is a researcher and a technical adviser focusing on gender and conflict prevention in Somalia and Somaliland. Having spent two years living in Hargeisa, Sif worked closely with women’s organisations to conduct research and design recommendations for programming to alleviate the barriers women face in accessing and influencing decision-making and peace-building processes. Currently she is working as a Technical Adviser on a preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) project in Mogadishu which aims to rehabilitate and reintegrate disengaged combatants. As such, she tries to understand how communities fractured by decades of violent conflict can reconcile and accept former combatants back in to their society. She also focuses her research on the inter-section between gender and conflict, involving women and their voices in her conflict analyses to holistically understand violence and preventative measures against it. Sif helped design monitoring and evaluation frameworks for different programmes aiming at assessing their effectiveness in promoting women’s role within decision-making and peace-building across the region.
