Mercy Corps Trains 40 CSOs On Conflict Sensitivity, Peace Building

Mercy Corps under its peace-building programme, Peace Action for Rapid Transformative Nigeria Early Response (PARTNER) has trained 40 civil society organisations in Kaduna on conflict sensitivity and peace building.

At a three-day training of the CSOs in Kaduna, the chief of party of PARTNER, Mr Danjuma Dawop, said the programme was for early warning, peace-building and social cohesion.

“We are here to organise a three-day train-the-trainers (ToT) workshop for 40 heads of civil society organisations (CSO). The programme is built on three anchors: early warning and early response, peacebuilding, and national cohesion,” he said.

Dawop said the CSOs were trained to ensure that they are aware of the impact of their programmes in either mitigating or causing conflict.

“We want to ensure that our programmes and interventions don’t cause conflict in the communities where they are carried out,” he added.

Dawop said, “The programme is implemented in nine states, but we are using third geographic target, tier one states are Plateau and Kaduna, tier-two are Katsina, Kogi, Kano and Benue which we are currently implementing, just expanding to those states, then tier three is Nasarawa, Zamfara and Niger states.

“The programme is mainstreaming workshop in the sense that we expect them to step down the training to other CSOs and to other communities. It is a mainstream programme for them to mainstream it into their programme activities meaning that they are adopting conflict sensitivity approach and ‘Do-No-Harm’ strategy to implement their projects.”

He therefore tasked the CSOs to implement programmes that mitigate conflict in Kaduna State.

The chief of party also disclosed that Mercy Corps has concluded plans to train journalists in the north on ‘Do-No-Harm’ and conflict sensitive reporting.

“We are planning to train media practitioners in the north on ‘Do-No-Harm, and conflict sensitive reporting which has to do with weaponization in the social media by online influencers so that they can influence the society positively,” he said.

He also advised Nigerians to be peace ambassadors in order to ensure peaceful co-existence in the country especially in Kaduna State.