By Amos Aar
A CONFLICT expert, Mr Steve Agbo, on Thursday counselled Response Officers to cultivate the habit of record-keeping to enable them to track the causes of conflicts and flashpoints for effective rapid response in order to avoid colossal damages.
Agbo, who is the Coordinator, Peace Action for Rapid and Transformative Nigerian Early Response (PARTNER) Project Team at the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR), gave the advice as a lead facilitator at a capacity-building programme for Early Warning and Early Response (EWER) Officers held in Makurdi, the Benue State capital on Thursday.
Asserting that every conflict has indicators whether generic or specific, and hence the need to keep record of the indicators, Agbo said the major objective of the programme was to train participants on how to use digital tools for conducting response and reporting.
He added that the PARTNER project is all about implementing early warning, particularly in the North Central and North Western regions of Nigeria in order to bring down the level of violent conflicts in those areas, notably in the last five years.
According to Agbo, IPCR has been working in partnership with Mercy Corps, West African Network for Peace Building, Kaduna State Peace Commission and Plateau State Peace Building Agency towards achieving the goal.
“In the course of implementing the PARTNER project, various peace structures have been established from the national to the local level. At the community level, we have early warning monitoring and reporting group and then, we have component response community-based reconciliation committees and gender focal persons at that level who are to interface with the early warning groups, also established at the state level, who are supposed to, in turn, interface with national early warning response team to ensure that there’s coordination among the stakeholders for effective prevention of conflicts so as to achieve sustainable peace in Nigeria.
“Today’s meeting is one among the number of interactions we have had in these peace structures. Particularly, today is unique because we have been interacting with the early warning response group at the state level but today, in view of the need for coordination among the early warning stakeholders to enhance effective response and bridge the gap between reporting and response, we brought together the reporting components, the gender component and the response component of the early warning peace structures,” Agbo said.
Speaking on the side-lines on his take home from the training, another participant, Mr Tim Torjir, a Conflict Early Warning Indicator Monitor (CEWIM) under Inclusive Action for Peace, Health, Empowerment and Development (IAPHED), commended the initiative of using ICT to mitigate conflict.
He noted that conflict has increasingly become very dynamic and complex and that people are cashing in on it. “They are people we refer to as conflict entrepreneurs. So, if we don’t train stakeholders in peace reporting, mitigating this conflict at the early stage, using ICT, I don’t think we are going anywhere,” Torjir said.
Earlier in his remarks, IPCR Director General (DG), Dr Joseph Ochogwu, represented by the head of EWER Unit, Dr Oboshi Agyeno, expressed concern that EWER system in Nigeria has been disjointed and less collaborative, saying “many agencies work in silos,” a development, he said, has created noticeable gaps for effective response to early warning.
Ochogwu also expressed worry that in many instances, early warning reports and information were not responded to, or sometimes, the response came too late to prevent violence and, on some occasions, citizens do not know which security agencies to send early warning signal to.
According to him, these and other challenges inspired the establishment of the Peace Structure at the national and selected states.
In order to achieve a robust, effective, and coordinated response to early warning, Ochogwu said the IPCR and PARTNER have adopted the use of technology to enhance conflict prevention strategy in EWER. He therefore urged the participants to acquire the knowledge to use the ICT App for effective response to early warning in Nigeria
The capacity-building programme was a collaboration between IPCR, PARTNER, Mercy Corps and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
