By Bashir Bello

KANO — A Non-Governmental Organisation, Partnership Against Violent Extremism Network in Nigeria, PAVE has organised a four-day capacity building training to curb violent extremism across North-Western states.

The training, organised in collaboration with the Office of the National Security Adviser, ONSA and ActionAid Nigeria, with funding from the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, GCERF, brought together the state actors and non-state actors from the region.

Speaking at the event, the Chairman of PAVE National Steering Committee, Jaye Gaskiya, said the training was to build capacity of the stakeholders to develop their state action plan based on their peculiarities and to enable states where they already had a security plan to integrate the component of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, PCVE to address the menace.

Gaskiya also said the training will cover various aspects of PCVE, including understanding the national framework and policy on PCVE, strategic communications, community resilience, and monitoring and evaluation.

According to him, “Really, the aim of the Training of Trainees, TOT is to build capacity around preventing and counter-violent extremism. So we are introducing people to the national framework, the national policy on PCVE. We are also going to have sessions around understanding that framework. We are going to have sessions around looking at our own context in the Northwest, because all the seven states in the Northwest are involved. And so we have two batches, but they are happening concurrently, simultaneously. There is a batch here in Kano, hosted in Kano. There is a batch hosted in Sokoto state.
The Sokoto state batch has Sokoto, Kebbi, and Zamfara. Yeah, and then the other states are here in Kano.

“We want to zero in on taking the stakeholders through a situation and a scenario where they can begin to think about their own state and plan about their own state. The national policy is a national document, and because it’s a national policy, it is very broad. It’s not specific in terms of what the issues are. It’s only at state level that we can become very specific about it. So, over these four days, we are hoping that we can come out at the end of the four days with something that looks like an outline of a state framework for PCVE. And so that these stakeholders will then go back to their state and then engage with wider stakeholders within their state, and then put flesh to this skeleton or draft.

“At the end of the process, in the next three months, we expect to see in each of the seven states in the Northwest to actually have a state action plan on PCVE and then included in that is also because local governments will also have varying experiences and context so that state action plan should be flexible enough to accommodate the diversity in the different local areas. So there should be a component in it that addresses local and peculiar issues for each of the
local governments,” Gaskiya said.

He added, “And so what we will be doing throughout this session, we are going to be looking at building capacity around also strategic communications. How do you develop narratives, positive narratives, alternative narratives? How do you counter negative narratives?
We are going to look at issues around community resilience. How do we enable support to communities so that they become more resilient to these kind of activities? And you know, a big factor in community resilience is also social coercion. So we want to also build capacity around how do we strengthen the capacity of institutions so that we can improve synergy and coordination between them first, then between them and external institutions like the police, like local government and so on and so forth.

“So, over these four days, we intend to go into all of these different components of PCVE, including monitoring and evaluation. How do we monitor, evaluate, and learn from our experiences,” Gaskiya said.

On his part, the Project Coordinator for SARVE III (System Structure Strengthening Approach Against Radicalisation to Violent Extremism) Project from ActionAid Nigeria, Aliyu Adamu emphasized on the importance of developing a strategic plan by the states to address violent extremism in the northwestern part of Nigeria.

A participant and the Chairman, PAVE in Katsina State, Dr. Bashir Ruwangodiya described the capacity building training as timely, noting that it will go a long way to help sharpen the skills of the stakeholders towards addressing violent extremism.