By Saidou S Baldeh
West Africa Network for Peace building in partnership with United Nations Population Fund has trained 25 trainers on early warning, Peace building and dispute management at the Metzy Beach Hotel.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Mrs .Salama Njie , national network coordinator, described the training as timely, saying “several conflict experts reveals an interplay of variables prevalent within diverse communities in the Gambia that support the need to strengthen effective local mechanisms for dispute resolution as a concrete step to conflict prevention and sustainable peace building.”
She said the strange of recent conflicts in the country after the political transition that “the level of pluralism and ricocheting dimension across the various local government and constituencies.”
According to her said, few years back, the government and development partners have been batting with restructuring social-political and economic regime that weaken state institutions with futility.
“The major reason for this has been linked to limitation of its agencies and parastatals to deals with the rapidity of these cries as well as poor support and cooperation for local initiatives as an option for complentary peace building platforms,” she added.
She said these challenges have precipitated a retrospection of communal resolution by various peace building scholars as strong option for harmonious inter-relationship among communities.
Juxtaposed to this opportunity is the obvious lack of capacity to scale up peace building training as well as context specific manual to guide its delivery and catalyze the participant of community and states intuitions towards supporting and complimenting state efforts in this regard, she said.
For his part, Mr.Kunle Adeniyi, UNFPA country representative said: “a country cannot development without peace building “adding Gambia is the part of peacefully country in the African.
