The Triple Nexus in three short lessons

The "Triple Nexus" is a simple idea: humanitarian action, development work and peacebuilding are three different kinds of work, but they work best when they are connected.

Humanitarian action responds to an emergency right now — food, water, shelter, medical care. Development work builds things up over time — schools, incomes, skills, infrastructure. Peacebuilding deals with conflict and trust — between neighbours, with authorities, between groups.

When these three are disconnected, a single shock can undo years of progress. A flood can wipe out a savings group's gains overnight. An eviction can scatter a community just as a peace dialogue was starting to work. Coordinating the three kinds of work means problems get seen whole, not one emergency at a time.

In Mathare, the three pillars show up in everyday community work. Humanitarian action looks like relief distribution after a fire, and water and sanitation projects in villages without reliable supply.

Development looks like savings and table-banking groups, skills training, environmental clean-ups, and the sports, arts and music programmes that keep young people engaged and earning.

Peacebuilding looks like dialogue sessions between groups in tension, community safety and policing partnerships, and work on gender-based violence and substance abuse — often the quietest work, and the hardest to see from outside.

Most organisations in Mathare do not fit neatly into one pillar. Many work across two or three at once — a youth group running sports sessions might also be mediating conflict, or a women's group collecting savings might also be running health outreach.

When Mathare community members were asked why coordination matters, the reasons were practical, not theoretical: avoid duplicating the same work in the same ward; unite civil society so smaller groups aren't working alone; and address real community problems rather than whatever a funding cycle happens to prioritise.

Coordination also means being able to account for money and impact — showing donors and the community what was actually achieved, together, rather than each group claiming the same ground. And it means recognising every pillar's work as valid: humanitarian relief gets noticed quickly, but peacebuilding and development work are just as necessary and often go unseen.

That is what this site tries to do: make the coordination picture visible, ward by ward, so organisations can find each other instead of working in the dark.