The Kenyan peace activist, Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, has died from injuries sustained in a recent car accident. Abdi won a Right Livelihood Award for “showing in diverse ethnic and cultural situations how religious and other differences can be reconciled, even after violent conflict, and knitted together through a cooperative process that leads to peace and development.” Democracy Now! spoke to her at a gathering of Right Livelihood winners in Germany last year.

Dekha Ibrahim Abdi: “But many years ago, 1993, we started a peace movement, following the inter-community clashes that started in the northeast of Kenya but spread in the border areas. And much of our work was to start sort of a way in which state and non-state actors can collaborate and build peace together—people from differences, either clan differences, political differences, religious differences, but trying to find ways in which people can share public assets, can share the public space, can work together, but looking at diversity not as a problem, but as a strength.”