Noticias

In collaboration with UNESCO Dakar, UNESCO-IICBA organized a planning meeting for the project "Youth Empowerment for Peace and Resilience Building and the Prevention of Violent Extremism (PVE) in Sahel Countries through Teacher Development" from 28 to 29 June 2018 in Dakar, Senegal. Leveraging the success of the consultation workshop that was held in Addis Ababa in May 2018, this meeting aimed to discuss the contextualization of IICBA's teacher training material for peace-building, and to map out action plans for the upcoming trainings and Japan study tour. Thirty-two participants of this meeting consisted of representatives from the Ministries of Education and Teacher Training Institutions in Algeria, Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan, as well as colleagues from UNESCO-IICBA and UNESCO offices in Abuja, Bamako, Dakar, and Rabat.

During the opening session, on behalf of Mr. Gwang-Chol Chang, Director of UNESCO Dakar, Mme Guiomar Alonso Cano welcomed all the participants. This was followed by remarks from H.E. Ambassador Shigeru Omori, Ambassador of Japan to Senegal. He highlighted the peace and security issues in this region and the imperative role that teachers and education could play. He was delighted to see that UNESCO, Sahel countries and Hiroshima University in Japan will have more exchange on PVE during the study tour in August 2018. In the end, Dr. Yumiko Yokozeki, Director of IICBA expressed her sincere gratitude to the Government of Japan for their generous and continued funding for IICBA's peace-building projects in the Horn of Africa and Sahel. She also appreciated the presence of participants and wished the workshop very fruitful outcomes.

Ms. Eyerusalem Azmeraw, Project Officer of UNESCO-IICBA presented the project and IICBA's teacher training material on Transformative Pedagogy for Peace-building. Participants reviewed and discussed the material in group and provided inputs on how to improve and integrate it with the context of the Sahel countries. Upon their requests, religion divides, drugs, violence, poor governance and corruption as the root causes of conflict, and inter-religion/culture dialogue, sports and life skills as conflict resolutions will be added into the training material. IICBA will also work with participants and experts to collect good experiences and make the training material more practical for teachers in the classroom.

Consolidated work-plans were submitted by countries before the conclusion of the workshop. Here are the upcoming activities in a nutshell:

• Japan study tour from 25 July to 8 August 2018;

• Needs assessment in July/August 2018;

• Finalization of the training material in September 2018;

• Training of Trainers in October 2018;

• Cascading of trainings from November 2018 to March 2019.

URL:

http://www.iicba.unesco.org/node/313