Fifty security personnel from different units in the Lower River Region have formally graduated after completing a ten-day professional training on Cyber Crime, Conflict Resolution and Peace Building.
The training was organised by Ba’lal Rural Empowerment and Sustainable Development Initiative (BRESDI).
The graduation ceremony held at the organisation’s office in Jarra Soma on Monday evening featured the presentation of certificates to participants to the training in the company of their friends, colleagues and a cross section of the community.
In his address at the ceremony, Amadou A. Bah, Executive Director of BRESDI, said the training was executed by the Silicon Institute of Technology and Professional Studies, a product of BRESDI with focus on key areas needed by the service personnel on peacemaking ventures around the world.
Mr Bah, who lectured on introduction to cyber crime during the training, believed that it is important for the police to be prepared to confront cyber crimes and its related problems within their jurisdiction.
“As Gambia being a developing country in terms of technology, the security has a stake in the protection of lives and properties from criminals using the computer as a tool to commit crimes such as malicious hacking, cracking, and impersonation on the web,” he said.
The lecturer on Conflict Resolution, Sedia Cham, said the participants underwent vigorous slides exposition looking into the genesis of conflict based on its “root, trunk and branches” and conflict handling tools in the light of current upheavals within households, families, communities and in countries.
He expressed confidence that the granduants have acquired the capacity to serve as peace builders in pre and post-conflict.
Ebrima Kinteh, training coordinator who doubled as a trainer on peace building to the training exposed the pedagogic stages he subjected the trainees to during the course.
He graded the awardees as well informed grandaunts on peace building as an exercise of “reducing risk of places and situations from lapsing or relapsing into conflict and laying foundation for sustainable peace and development.”
Speaking on their merits to The Point Newspaper earlier at the end of the training, Buba Jammeh, one of the training participants from the Soma Custom Post, said the two hundred dalasi he paid for the training was a worthy investment for him.
He described the course as a similitude to government’s agenda to decentralise access to education to the provinces.
“It is not our wish to witness situations demanding peace keeping and cyber attacks, but when the need arise we should be able to intervene to save lives and properties at all times,” he said.
Thomas Colley, Soma Immigration Station Officer (S/O), said the programme was very much important to them as security officers.
“Most of us are unaware of cyber crimes and we might be engaged in activities such as uploading pictures, on the internet which may be detrimental to our own lives and the lives of other people,” he said.
“The techniques and the strategies we have learnt here in regards to tracking and handling cyber case in the charge office and within the community in which we are operating are well earned,” he added.
For Njemeh Fofana, from National Drug Enforcement Agency unit of the Soma Police Station, her course experience is a degree she was yet to realise in her profession.
All it entails, she said, is a simplification of her thoughts in approaching future cases of her responsibility.
“I have learnt how to make peace among people peacefully. I have gained knowledge on how to approach these issues.”
