The history of Tanzanian multi-party elections had incidents of conflict from the polls in 1995 onwards. Within this context, a number of stakeholders have been engaging in dialogues for peace particularly before elections. While these dialogues have contributed towards conflict mitigation, it has been noted that these dialogues tend to be more episodic than continuous, and the latter would have a greater impact.

In addition, these local level dialogues have played an important role in addressing other local-level tensions related to social and economic issues. In order to contribute towards the ongoing peace dialogue, the UNDP-led Democratic Empowerment Project (DEP) in collaboration with Tanzanian dialogue conveners developed this handbook on “Community Dialogue for Sustainable Peace in Tanzania.”

DEP held a training of trainers of dialogue conveners from various civil society organisations and networks prior to the October 2015 elections on sustainable peace dialogues. DEP also began the development of a handbook, which aims at strengthening the Tanzanian culture of dialogue for conflict prevention and peace building mainly at community level as a resource to support dialogue conveners to reduce and manage mainly local level tensions.