By Duncan Miriri
NAIROBI, Nov 29 (Reuters) - A woman awarded one of Sweden's "Alternative Nobel" prizes for her mediation work in a conflict-riven region of north Kenya pledged on Thursday to use her $77,000 prize money to found a "Peace University."
Dekha Ibrahim Abdi will travel to Stockholm in December to receive one of the four 2007 Right Livelihood Awards for her work since the 1990s promoting solutions to feuds and deadly conflicts in Kenya's remote and neglected north-east.
"The award money is a recognition for the work I have done, and that work I did not do alone, but with my fellow Kenyans, especially with the people of Wajir," said Abdi.
The Kenyan activist was born in Wajir in 1964 when the region was immersed in a bloody conflict called the "Shifta War", as the newly independent government in Nairobi sought to crush a pro-Somali secessionist movement.
"I hope to use the money as an endowment fund for the Peace University in Wajir," Abdi added, saying she would work to build up a pro-peace higher learning centre from scratch.
At a news conference in Nairobi, Abdi said her motivation for conflict resolution among the mainly nomadic local population came after she failed to sit her high school exam because her family had fled their home due to fighting.
"The night before, state security agents burnt the villages around us and everyone had to flee to a local school," she said.
In their citation, the private Right Livelihood foundation said Abdi's peace negotiation methods have been copied around Kenya and other trouble-spots in Africa.
"Her comprehensive methodology combines grassroots activism, a soft but uncompromising leadership, and a spiritual motivation drawing on the teachings of Islam," the citation said.
Abdi, a mother-of-four, shares this year's Right Livelihood awards with a Sri Lankan scholar and expert on nuclear threats, a Canadian couple who have worked on threats from genetic crop engineering, and a Bangladeshi solar energy company. (Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
SOURCE: Reuters, November 29, 2007