In order to strengthen capacities for effective humanitarian assistance by providing participants with thorough knowledge and skills of the humanitarian sector, a Humanitarian Assistance and Women, Peace, Security in West Africa Core Course (HAWA WPS CC) has opened at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Centre (KAIPTC) in Accra.
It will enhance interaction and mutual understanding between actors from civil protection authorities, security forces and NGOs involved in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
For over nine years, the KAIPTC has sought to foster this training together with Austrian partners.
Opening the two-week course, Chief Coordinator-KAIPTC, Colonel Christian Yaw Dagadu, said the next two weeks will discuss some of the hurdles to peace and development West Africa faces today.
“Today, more than 130 million people in the region live in extreme poverty. Our population is particularly vulnerable to the effects of widespread food insecurity, recurrent natural disasters, climate change, the global economic crisis, socio-political instability and a pandemic like the just-experienced COVID-19”, he added.
Colonel Dagadu noted that this particular course contributes to several strategic objectives of the ECOWAS Humanitarian Policy and Action Plan, the ECOWAS Disaster Risk Reduction Gender Strategy and Action Plan 2020-2030, as well as the EU Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security among others, through capacity building and awareness creation.
He informed participants that in emergencies, civilian, police and military actors find themselves working side by side, and thus for effective disaster relief and assistance the use of coordinated measures is indispensable.
To ensure that the course will help to foster human capacities, institutional interaction and civil-military cooperation, KAIPTC introduced a team of regional and international facilitators comprising very experienced practitioners who will share the sum of their best practices, lessons learned and experience gained in the field.
Finally, Colonel Dagadu thanked the Austrian government – in particular the Austrian Centre for Peace and Austrian Federal Ministry of Defence – for the generous support to joint efforts aimed at strengthening peace and security in Africa.
The project, Capacity Development for Humanitarian Assistance in West Africa, aims to strengthen capacities for effective humanitarian crisis response in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
The overall project is gender mainstreamed to provide institutional guidelines on the integration of gender equality in humanitarian assistance.
On May 2, 2023, Mr. Karl Nehammer became the first Austrian Chancellor to visit Ghana, and therefore the KAIPTC. His visit consolidated the near-decade of fruitful relations between Austria and KAIPTC, which began in 2014 with the HAWA Project.
The HAWA Core Course will provide a thorough introduction to Humanitarian Assistance: including Humanitarian Actors and their mandates, roles and modes of operation; the Disaster Risk Management Cycle; Typology of Disasters; Components of Humanitarian Action; Humanitarian Principles, Standards and Codes of Conduct; the ‘Do no harm’ approach; and International Humanitarian Law.
