(Thursday August 25th, 2016 Issue)
ECOWAS
is working beneficially with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to consolidate
conflict prevention and peace building efforts in the region.
Pursuant
to this, the ECOWAS Commission organized a two-day workshop which ended on the
17 August 2016 in Dakar, Senegal.
As
part of the commitment to advance the cause of peace while evolving a holistic
approach to conflict resolution in West Africa, the Commission embarks on an
annual CSO sensitization workshop on the implementation of the ECOWAS Conflict
Prevention Framework (ECPF) in Member States.
The
workshop was put together to assess the progress made since the 2015, while
introducing and adopting a Terms of Reference that would define the modalities
for an ECOWAS-CSO partnership on conflict prevention initiatives.
It
also had the objective of providing CSOs with a monitoring tool which can be
used to track the progress of national conflict prevention programmes, design
strategies that will enhance effective implementation of conflict prevention
interventions at local and national levels, and discuss regional and national
peace and security issues which are meant to be prioritized.
Declaring
the workshop open, the ECOWAS Director of Political Affairs Dr. Aderemi
Ajibewa, described the annual convergence as a necessary exercise which should
be conducted steadily in order build synergies and strengthen the existing
partnership between the Commission and CSOs.
He
charged the CSOs to develop concrete strategies to prevent the occurrence and
prevalence of conflicts in the region.
Participants
harped on the need to strengthen the role of the CSOs as principal actors in
conflict prevention and peacebuilding in the sub-region.
More
than 40 CSOs intervening in the field of conflict prevention and peacebuilding
from the 15 ECOWAS Member States attended the workshop.
Also
on hand were senior officials of the workshop facilitators – the West African
Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping
and Training Centre (KAIPTC), and supportive consultants.
The
ECPF is one of the legal frameworks of ECOWAS that serves as a practical guide
on conflict prevention to which ECOWAS and its Member States can refer in their
cooperation and engagements with partners.
The
Dakar workshop was a follow-up to a previous CSO workshop that was held in
August 2015, in Accra, Ghana.
