Cameroon gets its first peacekeeping training centre

Cameroon gets its first peacekeeping training centre

Deborah-Fay Ndhlovu

The new International Security Forces Training School in the town of Awaé in southern Cameroon is meant to train a thousand police officers and peacekeepers every year.

The school, known in French as the Ecole Internationale des Forces de Sécurité or EIFORCES, has received funding from the Japanese ministry of foreign affairs as part of an effort to upgrade policing in four countries - Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana and Mali.

Japan provided US$ 2.5 million to the four countries for upgrading.

The upgrading will assist three existing centres, the Ecole de Maintien de la Paix de Bamako (the Bamako Peace-Keeping School), in Mali, the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Ghana and the Cairo Center for Conflict Resolution and Peacekeeping in Africa (CCPA) in Egypt.

Mali's Bamako Peace-Keeping School, established in 2007, will use its allocation to shore up courses on peace studies. It trains more than 800 staff every year and this year ran courses for security personnel in Burundi, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Gabon.

The Mali institute partners with the Centre for Security and Policy in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Military Training Assistance Programme and the Pearson Peacekeeping Center, both in Canada. The Mali school is led by Phillipe Bouillaud, Mali's former minister for internal security and civilian protection. Bouillaud was a colonel in the military before he became a diplomat.

The Accra-based Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, which is led by political scientist Christian Edem Kobla Dovlo, will use its allocation to offer courses and conduct research on conflict prevention and peace studies for West Africa.

Ghana has spent half a century sending peacekeepers on United Nations missions in countries as diverse as Rwanda, Kosovo and Lebanon.

The centre is presently organising two courses: one on development diplomacy programme from 30 August to 6 October 2010, and another on West Africa peace building institute course, which will run from 6 to 24 September 2010.

Soad Shalaby, an economist and former assistant to Egypt's minister of foreign affairs, is the director of the Cairo Center for Conflict Resolution and Peacekeeping in Africa, which was created in 1994 to build the capacity of African peacekeepers.

The Cairo Centre is running a course this month in capacity building of Sudanese non-governmental organisations in Eastern Sudan from 19 to 23 September 2010 and will be offering training for United Nations judicial officers in October and a course on strengthening the capacities of Sudanese peace-builders in November.

The Japanese foreign ministry, led by Katsuya Okada, provided considerable financial assistance to the peacekeeping training centres in Egypt, Ghana and Mali last year, as well as providing similar assistance to Benin, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa.

The development is a timely one for Africa, whose heads of state declared 2010 as a year of peace and security at their summit in Ethiopia earlier this year.

Armed conflicts have seen millions of people displaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and the Sudan recently.

Links
Peacekeeping in Africa
Ecole de Maintien de la Paix de Bamako
Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre Cairo Center for Conflict Resolution and Peacekeeping in Africa