Ruth Daan had been teaching Primary 5 in Jos South LGA for eleven years when ENPUAI held an open training for community volunteers in her neighbourhood in 2023. She attended out of curiosity. She stayed because she recognised the methods from her classroom instinctively: listen first, validate feelings, find the shared thing.
“Good teaching and good peacebuilding are the same thing,” Ruth says now. “You are always trying to get people to see past what divides them to what they have in common.”
After completing ENPUAI’s Community Peace Facilitator Certification, Ruth returned to her school and started a peer mediation programme for students from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Within a year, the programme had trained 120 students as junior peace ambassadors.
She then extended the model to the wider community. Today, Ruth coordinates a network of forty-three trained community mediators across Jos South and Jos North — a near-equal mix of Christians and Muslims, Berom and Hausa, youth and elders. The network has responded to seventeen escalating inter-communal situations since January 2024, de-escalating all but one before any violence occurred.
In December 2024, Ruth was recognised by the Plateau State House of Assembly with a Commendation for Community Service. ENPUAI has since partnered with the Plateau State Ministry of Education to pilot her peer mediation model in twelve additional schools across the state.
“I did not set out to be a peacebuilder. I just wanted my students to stop fighting. It turns out the whole country has the same problem — and the same solution.” — Ruth Daan, Peace Facilitator, Plateau State