By; AMOS TAUNA, Kaduna
The Country Director, Equal Access lnternational (EAI), Dr Maji Peterx, has noted that the organisation is into a programme that is piloted in four states, working on women and youth as peace builders towards ensuring peaceful coexistence in the country.
Speaking to New Nigerian in Kaduna on Thursday, the country Director explained that the programme presently is in four states, namely, Kaduna, Kano, Plateau and Benue, working in three local government areas each.
He added, “Part of the programme component is we are working with women, we integrate them into what we called women peace builders. We are working with the youths and we have a group for the youths peace builders and we have what we called community security platform commuters accountability forum.”
According to him, there is a group of other stakeholders within the community that they are training around early warning, early response, issue of inclusive security and how they could have a more coercive society.
Dr Peterx stated that the activity the organisation is doing is a training on media engagement and advocacy with other stakeholders, saying that they are trying to train them on how to lead advocacies, creating issues, making sure their advocacy is policy and issue based.
He added that the main focus is how to engage with the media and sustain their interest on the activities that they are doing so that it will keep them going.
“We are trying to see how to sustain our stakeholders and how a lot of people are going to make agitations especially in the inclusion of women and youths especially in the area of peace and security and other aspects of governance,” he explained.
The country Director expressed delight that the participants have been very responsive, stressing that it is a new framework of training that they (participants) are seeing.
According to him, “We are doing a high breed kind of training of integrated both hands and using other approaches and also using participatory approach. It has kept them interested in what is happening and they keep seeing this is something they definitely need and it is something that will help them in different activities especially as we have representatives of different organisations from our partners organisations. It promises and it gives a good focus in the future and how things can get better,” he assured.
