Training
By Lizzy Okoji
Abuja, Aug. 24, 2018 (NAN) The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Nigeria and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission are organising a six-day training for it’s members of staff to enable them to effectively deliver humanitarian services.
Mr Francis Garriba, Senior External Relations Assistant, UNHCR, Nigeria, made the disclosure on Friday in Abuja.
According to Garriba, the Emergency Management Training (EMT) will hold from Aug. 26 to Aug. 31, at the Martin Luther Agwai Leadership and Peacekeeping Centre, Jaji, Kaduna State.
He said that 35 persons from the UNHCR, ECOWAS staff and members of the ECOWAS Emergency Response Team (EERT) in ECOWAS member states would participate in the training.
Garriba said that participants would be armed with skills that would enable them to better provide timely, quality and effective humanitarian intervention in times of crises in the ECOWAS region.
He said that the training was organised within the framework of a Memorandum of Understanding signed between UNHCR and the ECOWAS Commission in 2001 to work closely together, especially in the area of capacity building.
“The main objective of the training is to build and improve the capacity of ECOWAS and EERT members to effectively deliver humanitarian assistance in the region, especially given the frequency of forced displacements or refugee movements in such instances.
“Fully sponsored by UNHCR, the EMT is taking place within the backdrop of a series of violent crises in Africa as a whole and in West Africa in particular,” Garriba said in a statement.
“For over two decades, a number of humanitarian situations in the West African region have resulted in loss of lives, displacements, and loss of property.
“The civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’Ivoire in the past, as well as the ongoing insurgencies in Nigeria and Mali, have triggered a significant loss of lives and internal displacements within these countries, as well as refugee movements across their borders.”
He explained that to control and reduce the impact of these emergencies, ECOWAS has been deploying different measures, including the 1999 Protocol Relating to Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping and Security.
Garriba said that Article 40 of the Protocol mandates the commission to develop its own capacity to effectively undertake humanitarian actions for prevention and management of conflicts in the region.
He said that accordingly, the EERT was developed as the regional tool for humanitarian intervention in the region.
He added that over the past 10 years, the ECOWAS Commission has been training delegates from member states in the management and response to emergencies. (NAN)
LIZ/PDE
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(Editing by Peter Ejiofor)