20th July, 2022: For over a decade, the Government of Norway has been a financial pillar to the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC), supporting the Centre’s strategic plan and vision “to become the leading and preferred International Centre for training, education and research that are focused on ensuring a peaceful and secure Africa”. To deal with the complex security challenges facing the West Africa region especially, and Africa as a whole, knowledge, skills and competencies are critical. Through the Norwegian funding support, thousands of civilian, police and military personnel have benefitted from several training courses that focus on conflict management, peace support operations and peace and security studies.
Over the years, Norway has sponsored several courses, some of which include the Election Observation Training Course, the Conflict Analysis and Mediation Course, the Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism Course, the Criminal Justice Course. Jointly, the courses have equipped participants to understand, diagnose and analyze conflicts more effectively using different tools and frameworks related to conflict analysis and mediation to enhance conflict prevention, management and resolution; enabled them to support processes to ‘fine tune’ the delivery of elections to strengthen democratic gains in Africa; and strengthened their understanding of the operations of criminal justice agencies and how they co-function to promote the ‘Rule of Law’, just to cite a few outcomes of the Norwegian Support to KAIPTC.
At KAIPTC, all the training courses are developed from research, and so there is strong nexus between research and training in order to ensure that all courses are relevant and meet the gaps and needs of peace and security actors. As part of its commitment to support KAIPTC to provide cutting edge research-led training, the Government of Norway funded a seven-country research mission to interrogate and gain deeper insights into emerging security complexities in West Africa. The mission visited countries like Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Mali, Nigeria and Niger and carried out research in the areas of elections and democracy, maritime security, agro-pastoralist conflicts, reintegration of ex-insurgents, violent extremism, jihadism and radicalization. The mission enabled KAIPTC to better understand the challenges faced by key actors in conflict prevention, conflict management and post-conflict reconstruction and development. More importantly, the rich knowledge and insights garnered from the research mission would feed into course reviews and, where relevant, lead to the development of new ones. Equally importantly, this knowledge resource would serve as policy recommendations to actors in peace and security, and through KAIPTC publications, contribute to disseminating knowledge on African peace and security.
Currently, Norway is KAIPTC’s only core funder, supporting both the operational and strategic objectives of the Centre. Indisputably, the Government of Norway has demonstrated its commitment to the institutional sustainability of the Centre and to the cause of a peaceful, secure and prosperous African continent.