In a bit to prevent vicious circle of age long violent conflicts ravaging the country, an organization under the auspices of Cleen Foundation in partnership with University of California has trained about 50 persons on early warning and early response (EWER) in Plateau State.
The 50 trainees were drawn from the communities of Barkin Ladi and Jos South Local Government Areas of the state.
Recall, in the recent past Barkin Ladi and Jos South Local Governments have became the epic center of violent conflicts as a cattle rustling, forceful invasion of land, farmers-herders clash amongst other criminality.
Speaking during the capacity building workshop held Thursday at Valada Hotel, Jos, the executive director of Cleen Foundation Gad Peter said, basically, this is the continuation of efforts with our partners the University of California to support and increased peace and stability in Plateau State especially in Barkin Ladi and Jos South Local Government Areas.
According to Peter, ” I am sure your aware of efforts that the federal and state Governments in collaboration with the international communities are making to increased peace and stability.
“So, what were doing today is to train about 50 persons from this two Local Government on early warning and early response (EWER) and the ability to increase community resilience; and to be able to improve dialogue in their actions; and above all is to have a good relationship with the traditional institutions, religious leaders and the Local Government agency that has those mandate to provide peace and security because as civilians you cannot do much more than to raise alarm and call the attention of the stakeholders to do the needful.
“So we established what we called community safety partnership (CSP) and we will establish the community accountability forum (CAF). All of this are members of the communities cutting across from Fulani to Berom, Christian to Muslim, women to men and young people to ensure that they were been able to work together to promote peace and security, and to improve security in their communities.
“The role of community accountability forum,CAF, is to help mitigate conflict. Conflict cannot be averted totally but you can used negative impact of conflict of people. And again is for them to be able to draw the attention of the Local Government chairman, the sector commandant, the District Police officer (DPO) and other people on issues affecting their community and for them to appeal to the community members especially the stakeholders; and to help more importantly in providing this early warning that would lead to early action.
“Link and expand your operations by working with other people to develop actionable emergency response plans”, Peter charged the participants.
He also revealed that the foundation is determine to cascade down the training to other Northern States to de-escalate violence.
