By Peter Duru, Makurdi

The World Bank funded Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes, ACReSAL, in partnership with Search for Common Ground, SFCG, have commenced a six day training to build the capacity of the staff of ACReSAL in the North Central zone on conflict management.

The training focuses on  Conflict Resolution, Conflict Reporting, Conflict Monitoring, and Stakeholders Mapping to enhance the capacity of the trainees to implement their projects in their respective states.

The National Conflict and Policy Analyst with SFGC who led the team of Search facilitators, Andy Nkemnaeme said the training became necessary given the importance of peace in the communities “especially where the intervention is being implemented.”

He said: “Without peace, we cannot have any development. So there must be peace for them to implement their projects. That is what we are doing. Let them get empowered with the rudiments of peace building so they can have a peaceful community where they can implement their projects.”

Nkemnaeme explained that they are working in the areas of farmers/herders conflicts especially in Benue and all the seven states and also in the North West and the North East.

He stated that the participants “must have to be able to create peaceful communities for their project to be successful. So we are working with them to build their capacity not only in common ground approach to conflict but also in conflict mitigation, conflict monitoring and reporting.

“We believe in early warning and early response. They say prevention is better than cure. It is better we prevent a violence from happening than waiting to react after the violence happens.

“So we are going to teach them how to monitor conflicts to ensure they see the early warning signs and indicators of conflicts and be able to report it accordingly and in the shortest possible time.”

Also, Mrs. Mbalamen Yuwa, of the Federal Project Management Unit of ACReSAL, pointed out that the designers of the project took into consideration the conflicts in parts of the country “and in their work plan they included this activity on peace building and conflict resolution.”

Mrs Yuwa who assured that the training would be cascaded down to other implementers of the programme said “this is the third and fourth of the series of capacity building from Search for ACReSAL staff.

“At the end of the training we are going to have the monitoring and reporting technic of conflict to ensure that the people we will put in place after mapping them out will be able to monitor early morning signs and report them in good time so that they can be nipped in the bud.”

The Social Livelihood Officer of Benue ACReSAL, Anne Okoh who commended the organisers of the exercise said, “it will help us improve ourselves in our various schedules and field of work.

“As we go into the field, as it is known of human nature, we could see conflict situations and we are being trained on how to effectively handle such situations in communities where we have our interventions. We hope that the training will give us the expertise and improve our capacity in mediation in all the places that ACReSAL is intervening in the respective states.”