Working in advocacy in Washington DC during the 1990s, I was deeply aware that people were not paying serious attention to the Horn of Africa at the time. There was a huge amount of international interventions and policies being formulated and implemented, but there was no space being given to the views and voices of women from the region.

With so much going on internationally at the time, the fundamental importance of participation - of  simply being there and making yourself heard - was so clear to me.

I was frustrated that I had been unable to participate at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, and I was absolutely determined that it would not happen again with Beijing.

Making it to Beijing, my first experience of an international event on that scale, would turn out to be one of the most important experiences of my life.

To be there was truly extraordinary. You felt awash in contradictory feelings, overwhelmed yet incredibly comforted, feeling you are among friends while surrounded by strangers, being far from home among many new cultures yet feeling at home.

It was a new environment for us all, I had never seen so many women in one place! These were women who brought with them incredible stories - experiences of pain, of discrimination, and of overcoming the odds. They brought strategies, insights, inspiration, their vulnerability and their courage, their pain and their compassion. These were the women my mother had always told me to stay away from!

These were women who wanted to be heard, and wanted to listen to others. I had never seen people talk with such clarity, honesty and openness about the things in their lives that caused them injury - both physical and emotional - the things that we needed to address in our communities and across the world. There was such power in seeing and understanding that your own struggles were part of a global movement

Beijing was a ‘safe space’ long before I ever learned what the concept was.

Despite the rain, it was a place of such warmth and optimism. The cultural shows were so very beautiful, the participants showing the happiest elements of their communities, the traditions that made them most proud. It felt so important as we all dreamed of building a world in which those positive things endured while the inequality, violence and discrimination we faced would be banished.

It was with this spirit of change and optimism that I and my colleagues organized our own conference for women from the Horn of Africa. At the time, Somalia was in the middle of the worst violence of the civil war that had followed the fall of the dictatorship, while Eritrea was the youngest country in Africa. We thought it was the right time to start discussing how the new frameworks for women’s rights could be made to work for women in the region, defining what women’s rights meant for Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Sudanese women.

It was an ambitious plan, we were delighted to be joined by truly inspiring women speakers, including Navi Pillay, the South African lawyer and judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda who would go on to serve as the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. We were truly excited.

But after the first day, the mood of the women we had invited was restless.

I tried to find out what was causing the discontent with the participants. We wanted them to understand the progress that was being made internationally on women’s rights.

They were all clear, they told me - We know who we are, we know the difficulties that we face as women. But look what war has done to us. We need to live again as humans first.

Don’t talk to us about women’s rights now, talk to us about peace.

The Somali state had been more than simply fractured, it had been shattered into millions of pieces. These women knew that in such an environment, no lasting progress for women could ever take root.

It was this conversation - talking with these women - that brought me to think about peace and what peace means, and changed the course of my work ever since.

Immediately I knew we had to adapt to the priorities of those we were working with.

We spoke to our contacts and they invited us to make a proposal. I didn’t even know how to write one, but after our early missteps we spoke to our partners until I felt that I had a mandate and we worked on one. At the time, there simply wasn’t a mature or even emergent Somali civil society. For the most part the organizations that did exist were humanitarian in their purpose, spending most of their time lining the corridors of UN agencies and the Red Cross. People were concerned with famine, humanitarian crisis; everything else that civil society could work on - reconciliation, peacebuilding, human rights - were side issues. Everything was reactive.

We couldn’t then bring civil society together. At the same time, the conflict had seen nearly everyone return to their clan’s bases to seek safety. So we had to work out who we would invite and on what basis we selected them.

The criteria we agreed were that participants must be women making a difference in their communities. Among them were teachers, lawyers, midwives, grassroots leaders - professional women. At the same time there were grandmothers, mothers and others who had become leaders in the community when their men had left to fight in the war, some never to return.

Throughout, the UN agencies kept asking us who we were bringing, and what clan they were from. There were no formal peace negotiations going on at the time, and we weren’t looking to come out with a perfectly representative group - we wanted people who had influence and respect in their communities, who recognized they had a stake in peace. The UN were simply not used to working how we were proposing; we told them that if we have 10 women who are making a difference but who are from the same clan, we will still bring them because they will have influence.

Ultimately we brought together 60 women from 30 organizations, mainly humanitarian, for our next session on peace, held in Nairobi. For many of the women, it was the first time they had left the country - and their clan lands - since the war. It was essential that we were able to take them somewhere where it would be possible for them to relax.

Our work was still not even done convincing our participants to come. Many demanded to know who else was attending, refusing to come if certain people or representatives from particular clans would be there.

Before the war, these were people whose clans and families had intermarried, went to the same schools, were neighbors; now they were separated, divorced, estranged, some sworn enemies. Everyone believed the worst of any other potential attendee, so we didn’t tell any of them who would be there.

We knew it would be volatile, that we had to tread carefully, but at the same time we knew we would make no progress at all if we didn’t even challenge the new orthodoxy and mentality of civil war. So we mixed up the rooms at random. It was explosive - “I won’t share a room with that woman, her son is a murderer, a war criminal! Her husband killed my husband, my brother, my son, my uncle!” etc and so on.

We told them that we were all there for peace; I don’t think any of us organizers slept at all the first night. We were terrified it would all break down before it had even begun.

Gradually, everything began to settle, everyone began to ease in the afternoon on the first full day. The women cried together, together they mourned for what they had lost, what their country had lost.

It took us getting through day one to get something of a hold on things. Having come from the brutalizing environment of war, that first night and some hours of the first day for the mutual recognition of each other’s humanity to re-emerge. Their own scars were not healed, and they were not yet ready to give absolution, but progress had been made.

They saw and understood what they had known only deep inside - that of course they were not alone in losing their mothers, their fathers, their sons and daughters.

Laid bare was the equality in misery and tragedy. Everyone had lost everything, lost their pictures, their pasts; the only memories that were left were the people, the only reminders what was physically still here.

In our preparations we knew that we had to bring in the best trainers, facilitators for the sessions. All conflicts are unique in their horror and recriminations, but there are always things we can learn from people’s experience. South Africa’s emergence from apartheid was very different - Somalia is home to one race, one religion - but we wanted people to understand how a much more diverse country had handled peace and reconciliation.

After five days in Nairobi, many of the participants had grown close, they could see what we were doing and they were anxious that it continue. We had to reassure them of our commitment, that it was something that would grow and that we would keep on those already involved.

The first and most difficult part had been achieved; from conflict we had built trust, created a space in which people could get back to familiarity - a space in which for the first time since it declared independence, we brought Somalilanders together with women from the South. Most important was the recognition that no one had gained from the war, all had lost.

For the second stage, we selected representatives from 15 of the 30 groups to take part in more extensive training for three weeks. This was in the new South Africa, the first training we had where our participants saw other communities scarred by violence and gradually working towards peace.

Alongside the training, something else was happening that we did not really plan. People were sitting together, talking together, eating together, reconnecting. The effect was profound. After South Africa, the women agreed by themselves without being prompted that they would do training on peace-building in their communities.

The result of work like this is usually a network or organization that is formed by participants. But we didn’t do this. The war was still going on, if a new group had been formed amid the fractious struggles and rivalries there would have been great suspicion about hidden agendas. We didn’t want to label our partners, we wanted them to go back to their communities without the perception of an agenda separate and alien from the community.

The reconnection that had gone on thanks to the support of our donors meant that a new group with a separate identity wasn’t needed. The women would go back to their own communities, then they would join their new colleagues in different communities, working together, so that each community would see women from different clans coming together for peace for the first time since the war.

It sparked the launch of new initiatives and groups. Perhaps more fundamental, it revived old national networks and groups, whose purpose had become an anachronism as the Somali state fell apart. Now they had been given new life and purpose. Somali civil society began to reform towards aims beyond simply dealing with crisis.

As civil society took stride with new strength, it found support from new corners, and many of the efforts started continue to this day. This work set me on the course on which I remain today. It was this experience that led me to study traditional methods of conflict resolution in Sudan, the foundation of SIHA, to found Karama, to bring together the Arab Regional Network on Women, Peace and Security. It led directly to the formation of the Libyan Women’s Platform for Peace, and similar work in Syria and Yemen.

Women involved went on to start their own civil society networks, became professionals, influencers in their communities, even government ministers.

We cannot forget though that tragically, some were killed in the conflict, some even assassinated.

Years later, out of the blue I received an email from one of the participants telling me that they had just completed their PhD, saying that she would never have got there without that first session in Nairobi.

It continues to inspire me and so many others. It remains the lodestar of my work now, the knowledge that you can do nothing without peace. It has informed everything since, from the MDGs, to UNSCR 1325, to the SDGs.

It was a moment when we all recognised that peace was the key,