The All Nigeria Peace Summit holds in Lagos on 7 November 2026, twenty five years after the Cape Town summit that shaped Rotary’s peace mission

Twenty five years ago, a young Rotarian named Ijeoma Pearl Okoro sat down to dinner at a revolving restaurant inside the Ritz Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa. She had joined Rotary only sixteen months earlier, in September 1999, and the gathering she was attending in January 2001, the Rotary Presidential Peace Summit, was her first international Rotary outing.

Okoro travelled to Cape Town in the company of her Rotary sponsor, Ojini Olaghere (née Eneli), and the late Past District Governor Eddie Spiff. It was at that dinner, she recalls, that she met the late Rotary International President Jonathan Majiyagbe, the late Mike Okwechime, and Past District Governor Tunji Funsho for the first time.

The summit was hosted by then Rotary International President Frank Devlyn, who had made peace a central theme of his presidency that year. It brought together Rotarians, Peace Fellows and global leaders for a single purpose, moving Rotary’s peace work “from dialogue to action.”

According to Okoro, the gathering was one of Rotary’s first major global events dedicated solely to peace. “That summit sent a clear message: Rotary must lead on peace,” she said.

One year later, in 2002, Rotary International launched the Rotary Peace Centers Program, the organisation’s flagship investment in peacebuilding. Since then, Rotary says it has committed over $100 million to train more than 1,700 Peace Fellows from over 140 countries, hosted across eight Peace Centers at Duke University, the University of North Carolina, the University of Queensland, Uppsala University, the University of Bradford, a centre in Tokyo, Makerere University in Kampala, and Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul.

Okoro said the message that emerged from Cape Town has stayed with her for a quarter of a century. “Peace isn’t a far off dream, it starts with us,” she recalled being told, adding that Rotary was urged to plant and protect peace “like a garden, nurtured daily in homes, classrooms, and communities.”

“That summit taught me one thing, when Rotary invests in peace, we invest in leaders,” Okoro said. “Today, that investment is called Rotary Peace Fellows. The Cape Town Summit helped build momentum for that investment.”

Twenty five years after Cape Town, Rotary’s peace conversation is coming to Nigeria. Lagos is set to host the All Nigeria Peace Summit on 7 November 2026, powered by all Rotary Districts in Nigeria and placing the country at the centre of a movement that Okoro watched take shape as a young Rotarian in South Africa.

For Rotarians like Okoro, the Lagos summit closes a circle that began in a hotel restaurant in Cape Town in 2001, when the idea of Rotary as a global peacebuilder was still new and the Peace Fellows program that would grow out of it was still a year away.

This feature is based on an account shared by Ijeoma Pearl Okoro, a Rotarian who attended the 2001 Cape Town summit, and is presented with the support of the Rotary District 9112 Public Image Committee.