Deleglise, Dimpho

Dimpho Deleglise is a gender, peace and governance specialist with a core specialisation in civil society inclusion and the localisation of peacebuilding, governance and development interventions, working across national, regional, continental and international levels. With over sixteen years of professional experience, she has designed, implemented and evaluated programmes that institutionalise civil society participation in conflict prevention, electoral processes, mediation and governance reform. Her work centres on embedding local organisations, informal peace infrastructures and civic networks within early warning and response systems, mediation processes, peace support operations and electoral governance frameworks, ensuring that local analysis, risk perceptions and accountability mechanisms inform institutional decision-making. Within this broader practice, she has strengthened the systematic inclusion of women’s and youth-led actors, translating the Women, Peace and Security agenda and inclusion commitments into practical instruments and training models applied across diverse political and conflict contexts.

Her work has delivered operational results, including the development of institutional mechanisms for civil society engagement within SADC and AU peace and security processes; the integration of local perceptions and community priorities into peace support operation mandates in contexts such as Mali, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Mozambique; and the deployment of cascade training models that have strengthened women leaders’ capacity to increase their political and electoral participation, engage in mediation, and lead civic mobilisation at scale.

Dimpho has served as an international consultant for organisations such as the World Bank, UNDP, International IDEA, GIZ, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the African Union, COMESA and SADC and has held senior research and advisory roles at the Peace Research Institute, the Institute for Security Studies and the Southern Africa Trust. Her work has directly informed AU–UN policy dialogues, electoral support programming and regional mediation practice, linking community-level action to continental mechanisms such as FemWise-Africa, SADC women mediators’ frameworks, and the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). She has led multi-stakeholder consultations and served as a trainer and facilitator, delivering practical policy tools—including toolkits, women’s leadership manuals, strategic frameworks and operational guidelines—that have been adopted by regional institutions and international partners to embed civil society participation within institutional practice. Across these engagements, her contribution has been to move localisation from principle to practice by establishing durable systems, partnerships and capacities that make inclusive peacebuilding and governance operational.

Her recent publications include a co-authored working paper analysing how inclusivity and resistance shape the functioning of peace agreement monitoring and oversight mechanisms in Ethiopia, Burundi and the Democratic Republis of Congo: Inclusivity and Resistance: Lessons from Peace Agreement Monitoring and Oversight Mechanisms in Africa, a monograph that develops a practices-oriented research agenda for studying African special envoys, African Special Envoys in Practice: A Research Agenda for Studying Complex Diplomatic Interventions;  and a policy study examining how African peace operations can be re-oriented towards civilian priorities through more systematic engagement with local actors,  Towards people centred African Peace Support Operations in Africa.