PROGRAMS OF WANEP

CBP - CAPACITY BUILDING PROGRAM OF WANEP TO BUILD A SUB-REGIONAL CONFLICT PREVENTION FRAMEWORK TO ACHIEVE LASTING PEACE

Early warning and early response strategy is very central to the prevention and resolution of conflicts in its nascent stage before they degenerate into violent conflicts of the magnitude of those experienced in the sub-region over the last decade. This strategy can save the usual huge costs that go with resolving full-blown conflicts and undertaking post-conflict reconstruction; it can avert as well humanitarian catastrophe of epidemic proportions. The efficacy of this strategy in the prevention of conflicts has led WANEP to integrate early warning and early response as part of its core activities. In a bid to establish a sub-regional conflict prevention framework in West Africa, WANEP has put in place a Capacity Building Programme (CBP) that seeks to establish and maintain well-coordinated networks of civil society organizations in each country across the sub-region, under the umbrella of WANEP, with a pool of trained and well-informed personnel that will work alongside ECOWAS to operate a functional and reliable early warning and early response mechanism across the sub-region.

Background
In 2000, WANEP conceptualized and established the West Africa Early Warning and Response Network (WARN) with technical support from the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response (FEWER), the then global network of early warning experts and organizations based in London, UK.[1] The aim of WARN is to institutionalize the culture of prevention in West Africa through an appropriate and effective early warning and early response mechanism. The objectives of WARN are to:

The goal is to develop an effective and workable early warning and conflict management system that is capable of producing demonstrable results in managing, mitigating and preventing violent conflict in West Africa.

In 2001, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and WANEP entered into a five-year partnership to promote preventive peacebuilding by developing local and regional capacities for conflict prevention and peacebuilding. WANEP in partnership with CRS obtained its initial USAID grant on Capacity Building in Conflict Prevention and Good Governance, in part to develop an early warning accessible database.

In 2002, the USAID grant facilitated the establishment and functioning of WANEP’s 12 National Network Secretariats in 12 countries in West Africa and the setting up of WANEP’s Liaison Office based in the ECOWAS headquarter in Abuja to ensure the interface between ECOWAS and CSOs in conducting the early warning program.

WANEP-ECOWAS Partnership
In 1999, WANEP began its initial formal steps with ECOWAS on issues of conflict prevention in the sub-region. On the 10^th of December 1999, following the signing in Lomé, Togo by Heads of State and Government of the Protocol, “Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping and Security,” ECOWAS commissioned WANEP to conduct an assessment of ECOWAS’ conflict prevention mechanism and both its capacity and training needs with a view to operationalising the Mechanism.

In 2003, as a consequence of its review of the internal conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cộte d’Ivoire, the ECOWAS’ Declaration on a Sub-Regional Approach to Peace and Security declared “human security” as the basic coherent doctrine underlying its work in peacebuilding, which resonates with WANEP’s vision. This was the foundation for formalizing the partnership between WANEP and ECOWAS through the signing, on 10^th February 2004, of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two organizations in recognition of the complementary role each plays.

The execution of WANEP’s mandates in the formalized partnership with ECOWAS was guaranteed with the second grant from USAID/WARP. The grant is a follow-up to the WANEP-CRS partnership in establishing community early warning systems in 7 countries under a project called the “Enhanced Conflict Prevention Framework for ECOWAS and Civil Society Organizations”. The project began in July of 2005 and is scheduled to be completed in June of 2007.

The partnership between ECOWAS and WANEP is crucial for the success of an early warning and early response program in West Africa since each partner has what the other needs and what neither can provide without the other. WANEP has access to a wide base of community monitors who provide first-hand and crucial information at the community level, whilst ECOWAS has the mandate of the states in the region to intervene at state-level and garner military resources when the need arises as demonstrated in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

This model of an inter-governmental institution working alongside civil society organization in West Africa is unique, innovative and an uncharted path. The model allows WANEP, the civil society organization in this case, to tap on its extensive support base to establish a community-based early warning system which is driven by an extensive network of partner Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) for a day-to-day provision of vital information that could be used by ECOWAS to engage governments in addressing vexing issues that could lead to crises. It is worth mentioning that WANEP’s network of civil society organizations (CSOs), as the foundation for such a system, is unparalleled in the world.

ECOWARN: ECOWAS Early Warning System
ECOWAS has agreed to work with WANEP as the partner of choice in the implementation of the ECOWARN, an on-line database reporting system designed to capture data collected from the field by both ECOWAS Member States monitors and WANEP’s networks of monitors on a weekly and incident-related basis around West Africa. ECOWARN, similar to the WARN program of WANEP, is a sub-regional initiative of the ECOWAS to closely monitor issues that can incite conflicts in each country in West Africa.

The on-line database consists of two types of report: Incident and Situation reports. The Incident report is fed into the database at any given time an event of significant proportions happens while the Situation report is submitted regularly on a weekly basis with the reporter responding to 98 indicators which help to provide a picture of the peace and stability status of each country. The reporting mechanism operates at three levels: countries, zones and headquarters. At the country level, incident and situation reports are submitted by WANEP National Networks that consist of civil society organizations (CSOs) within the ECOWAS countries. At the zonal level, the reports posted on the ECOWARN website are reviewed and analyzed at each zone by ECOWAS zonal bureau officers (ZBOs) and WANEP zonal coordinators (ZCs). The fifteen member states of ECOWAS are clustered into four zones. Each zone has a ZBO and ZC to ensure and maintain collaboration between WANEP and ECOWAS at the zonal level. At the headquarters level, the analysts at the Observation and Monitoring Centre (OMC) of ECOWAS and Peace Monitoring Centre (PMC) of WANEP examine the country reports together with the zonal analyses and develop assessments, alerts and recommendations for actions and interventions as the situation demands. The OMC and PMC are the peace and stability observatory centers responsible for collating and analyzing early warning reports from all the four zones for onward transmission, in digestible form, to the Executive Secretary of ECOWAS.

Before the advent of ECOWARN, the WARN program of WANEP has been producing narrative-based weekly early warning reports, monthly early warning bulletins, policy briefings on specific countries of ECOWAS, situation reports, quarterly early warning briefings at the AU Peace and Security Council and an annual publication on West Africa.

WANEP’s Liaison Office at the ECOWAS
The establishment of a liaison office within the ECOWAS Secretariat in Abuja, Nigeria, guarantees sustained consultation and collaboration between WANEP and ECOWAS on a daily basis in the implementation of the ECOWARN. The liaison office was set up during the first phase of the CBP when WANEP and CRS developed a framework for the realization of the WARN program. The liaison office provides the ECOWAS secretariat with civil society’s perspectives on issues impacting on peace and stability in the sub-region. The office provides civil society access to governments and decision-makers through ECOWAS. It also increases the leverage of WANEP in ECOWAS to create the much needed space for civil society’s contributions towards the formulation of sub-regional policies that would impact on human security and sustainable development in West Africa.

WANEP’s Comparative Strength: Network and Membership
WANEP is the largest peacebuilding networks in Africa with 12 national networks and over 450 member organizations. WANEP has networks in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cộte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinee, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. Cameroon has also become a member. In the near future, if funding permits, WANEP will expand into the remaining ECOWAS states - Cape Verde, Mali and Niger.

Increasingly, there is an acute awareness that the solutions to our global and regional challenges are addressed through collaboration and strategic partnerships. The WANEP Secretariat understood this dynamics from the beginning and has cultivated relationships with not only locally-based organizations but also regionally and internationally recognized institutions. Through this strategy, WANEP seeks to adopt a holistic approach in addressing the issue of human security in West Africa by making use of the expertise available in the various fields such as development, human rights and democracy and good governance that would create an enduring partnership with actors and organizations from their respective field of expertise to achieve a lasting peace and sustainable development in West Africa.

WANEP Trained Monitors
WANEP has trained personnel from all over the region in the field of early warning and early response. With respect to developing community, national and sub-regional capacities/structures for early warning and early response, using funding from the German-based Bread of the World organization, from 6-10 January 2003, WANEP initiated a training of trainers in conflict analysis in Abuja, bringing together heads of NGOs, academics, lawyers and community leaders from five of the six geopolitical regions of Nigeria in a 5-day intensive training program. At the end, 25 conflict analysts and 100 monitors were trained.

In its best developed in-country system in Liberia, among the 26 CSO members of WANEP-Liberia, five[2] have grown to be full-fledged early warning and monitoring organizations. They have more than 100 monitors trained and located in the Bong and Margibi districts with a well developed educational and communications network among the five organizations.

WANEP conducted training programs for monitors in Cộte d’Ivoire/Liberia (held in Liberia in 2003) that trained 75 monitors and 27 local analysts. Another training session was held in the Kaabu region (Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal) in January 2004. 23 monitors were trained and a pilot early warning project was designed for Guinea Bissau, the Casamance region in Senegal and for The Gambia.

WANEP has also collaborated with the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) to host the West Africa Peace Institute (WAPI) to train early warning monitors and trainers in conflict analysis from different part of the region.

Challenges of CBP
WANEP continues to pay particular attention and be responsive to the emerging capacity building needs of its networks and partners. The CBP will focus on strengthening the capacity of its networks and partners and enhancing the web-base database to integrate a customized version of incident and situation reporting system. Enhancing the early warning database will facilitate systematic and structured field reporting as well as interactive, real time analysis and visualization of baseline measures for conflict prevention. Besides, gender perspective has been absent from early warning and preventive response systems. It has been noted that the indicators of the on-line situation report are not gender-sensitive enough. The inclusion of gender-sensitive indicators is critical to early warning and early response because women are not always affected in the same ways as men in conflict. Thus, WANEP will work closely with ECOWAS to engender the ECOWARN system and conduct trainings on gender analysis of early warning report. The special attention given to gender in the early warning system will provide policy-makers with useful insights on how conflict issues impact on women.

[1] FEWER is no longer in existence
2] The five organizations are the Development and Educational Network (DEN), Save My Future Foundation (SMFF), New African Research and Development Agency (NARDA), Association of Evangelicals of Liberia (AEL), and the Rural Foundation for Development (RFD).

Youth and Peace Education (YPE)	CBP - CAPACITY BUILDING PROGRAM OF WANEP TO BUILD A SUB-REGIONAL CONFLICT PREVENTION FRAMEWORK TO ACHIEVE LASTING PEACE Early warning and early response strategy is very central to the prevention and resolution of conflicts in its nascent stage before they degenerate into violent conflicts of the magnitude of those experienced in the sub-region over the last decade. This strategy can save the usual huge costs that go with resolving full-blown conflicts and undertaking post-conflict reconstruction; it can avert as well humanitarian catastrophe of epidemic proportions. The efficacy of this strategy in the prevention of conflicts has led WANEP to integrate early warning and early response as part of its core activities. In a bid to establish a sub-regional conflict prevention framework in West Africa, WANEP has put in place a Capacity Building Programme (CBP) that seeks to establish and maintain well-coordinated networks of civil society organizations in each country across the sub-region, under the umbrella of WANEP, with a pool of trained and well-informed personnel that will work alongside ECOWAS to operate a functional and reliable early warning and early response mechanism across the sub-region. Background In 2000, WANEP conceptualized and established the West Africa Early Warning and Response Network (WARN) with technical support from the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response (FEWER), the then global network of early warning experts and organizations based in London, UK.[1] The aim of WARN is to institutionalize the culture of prevention in West Africa through an appropriate and effective early warning and early response mechanism. The objectives of WARN are to: Build the capacities of communities and CSOs in the early detection of nascent violent conflicts that will bring about early warning which will in turn generate early response mobilization. Foster collaborative relationships with/between civil society and existing national, sub-regional/regional and international early warning, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding organizations. Promote proactive/pre-emptive and integrated approaches to conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The goal is to develop an effective and workable early warning and conflict management system that is capable of producing demonstrable results in managing, mitigating and preventing violent conflict in West Africa. In 2001, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and WANEP entered into a five-year partnership to promote preventive peacebuilding by developing local and regional capacities for conflict prevention and peacebuilding. WANEP in partnership with CRS obtained its initial USAID grant on Capacity Building in Conflict Prevention and Good Governance, in part to develop an early warning accessible database. In 2002, the USAID grant facilitated the establishment and functioning of WANEP’s 12 National Network Secretariats in 12 countries in West Africa and the setting up of WANEP’s Liaison Office based in the ECOWAS headquarter in Abuja to ensure the interface between ECOWAS and CSOs in conducting the early warning program. Back to Top WANEP-ECOWAS Partnership In 1999, WANEP began its initial formal steps with ECOWAS on issues of conflict prevention in the sub-region. On the 10^th of December 1999, following the signing in Lomé, Togo by Heads of State and Government of the Protocol, “Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping and Security,” ECOWAS commissioned WANEP to conduct an assessment of ECOWAS’ conflict prevention mechanism and both its capacity and training needs with a view to operationalising the Mechanism. In 2003, as a consequence of its review of the internal conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cộte d’Ivoire, the ECOWAS’ Declaration on a Sub-Regional Approach to Peace and Security declared “human security” as the basic coherent doctrine underlying its work in peacebuilding, which resonates with WANEP’s vision. This was the foundation for formalizing the partnership between WANEP and ECOWAS through the signing, on 10^th February 2004, of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two organizations in recognition of the complementary role each plays. The execution of WANEP’s mandates in the formalized partnership with ECOWAS was guaranteed with the second grant from USAID/WARP. The grant is a follow-up to the WANEP-CRS partnership in establishing community early warning systems in 7 countries under a project called the “Enhanced Conflict Prevention Framework for ECOWAS and Civil Society Organizations”. The project began in July of 2005 and is scheduled to be completed in June of 2007. The partnership between ECOWAS and WANEP is crucial for the success of an early warning and early response program in West Africa since each partner has what the other needs and what neither can provide without the other. WANEP has access to a wide base of community monitors who provide first-hand and crucial information at the community level, whilst ECOWAS has the mandate of the states in the region to intervene at state-level and garner military resources when the need arises as demonstrated in Liberia and Sierra Leone. This model of an inter-governmental institution working alongside civil society organization in West Africa is unique, innovative and an uncharted path. The model allows WANEP, the civil society organization in this case, to tap on its extensive support base to establish a community-based early warning system which is driven by an extensive network of partner Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) for a day-to-day provision of vital information that could be used by ECOWAS to engage governments in addressing vexing issues that could lead to crises. It is worth mentioning that WANEP’s network of civil society organizations (CSOs), as the foundation for such a system, is unparalleled in the world. Back to Top ECOWARN: ECOWAS Early Warning System ECOWAS has agreed to work with WANEP as the partner of choice in the implementation of the ECOWARN, an on-line database reporting system designed to capture data collected from the field by both ECOWAS Member States monitors and WANEP’s networks of monitors on a weekly and incident-related basis around West Africa. ECOWARN, similar to the WARN program of WANEP, is a sub-regional initiative of the ECOWAS to closely monitor issues that can incite conflicts in each country in West Africa. The on-line database consists of two types of report: Incident and Situation reports. The Incident report is fed into the database at any given time an event of significant proportions happens while the Situation report is submitted regularly on a weekly basis with the reporter responding to 98 indicators which help to provide a picture of the peace and stability status of each country. The reporting mechanism operates at three levels: countries, zones and headquarters. At the country level, incident and situation reports are submitted by WANEP National Networks that consist of civil society organizations (CSOs) within the ECOWAS countries. At the zonal level, the reports posted on the ECOWARN website are reviewed and analyzed at each zone by ECOWAS zonal bureau officers (ZBOs) and WANEP zonal coordinators (ZCs). The fifteen member states of ECOWAS are clustered into four zones. Each zone has a ZBO and ZC to ensure and maintain collaboration between WANEP and ECOWAS at the zonal level. At the headquarters level, the analysts at the Observation and Monitoring Centre (OMC) of ECOWAS and Peace Monitoring Centre (PMC) of WANEP examine the country reports together with the zonal analyses and develop assessments, alerts and recommendations for actions and interventions as the situation demands. The OMC and PMC are the peace and stability observatory centers responsible for collating and analyzing early warning reports from all the four zones for onward transmission, in digestible form, to the Executive Secretary of ECOWAS. Before the advent of ECOWARN, the WARN program of WANEP has been producing narrative-based weekly early warning reports, monthly early warning bulletins, policy briefings on specific countries of ECOWAS, situation reports, quarterly early warning briefings at the AU Peace and Security Council and an annual publication on West Africa. Back to Top WANEP’s Liaison Office at the ECOWAS The establishment of a liaison office within the ECOWAS Secretariat in Abuja, Nigeria, guarantees sustained consultation and collaboration between WANEP and ECOWAS on a daily basis in the implementation of the ECOWARN. The liaison office was set up during the first phase of the CBP when WANEP and CRS developed a framework for the realization of the WARN program. The liaison office provides the ECOWAS secretariat with civil society’s perspectives on issues impacting on peace and stability in the sub-region. The office provides civil society access to governments and decision-makers through ECOWAS. It also increases the leverage of WANEP in ECOWAS to create the much needed space for civil society’s contributions towards the formulation of sub-regional policies that would impact on human security and sustainable development in West Africa. Back to Top WANEP’s Comparative Strength: Network and Membership WANEP is the largest peacebuilding networks in Africa with 12 national networks and over 450 member organizations. WANEP has networks in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cộte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinee, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. Cameroon has also become a member. In the near future, if funding permits, WANEP will expand into the remaining ECOWAS states - Cape Verde, Mali and Niger. Increasingly, there is an acute awareness that the solutions to our global and regional challenges are addressed through collaboration and strategic partnerships. The WANEP Secretariat understood this dynamics from the beginning and has cultivated relationships with not only locally-based organizations but also regionally and internationally recognized institutions. Through this strategy, WANEP seeks to adopt a holistic approach in addressing the issue of human security in West Africa by making use of the expertise available in the various fields such as development, human rights and democracy and good governance that would create an enduring partnership with actors and organizations from their respective field of expertise to achieve a lasting peace and sustainable development in West Africa. Back to Top WANEP Trained Monitors WANEP has trained personnel from all over the region in the field of early warning and early response. With respect to developing community, national and sub-regional capacities/structures for early warning and early response, using funding from the German-based Bread of the World organization, from 6-10 January 2003, WANEP initiated a training of trainers in conflict analysis in Abuja, bringing together heads of NGOs, academics, lawyers and community leaders from five of the six geopolitical regions of Nigeria in a 5-day intensive training program. At the end, 25 conflict analysts and 100 monitors were trained. In its best developed in-country system in Liberia, among the 26 CSO members of WANEP-Liberia, five[2] have grown to be full-fledged early warning and monitoring organizations. They have more than 100 monitors trained and located in the Bong and Margibi districts with a well developed educational and communications network among the five organizations. WANEP conducted training programs for monitors in Cộte d’Ivoire/Liberia (held in Liberia in 2003) that trained 75 monitors and 27 local analysts. Another training session was held in the Kaabu region (Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal) in January 2004. 23 monitors were trained and a pilot early warning project was designed for Guinea Bissau, the Casamance region in Senegal and for The Gambia. WANEP has also collaborated with the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) to host the West Africa Peace Institute (WAPI) to train early warning monitors and trainers in conflict analysis from different part of the region. Back to Top Challenges of CBP WANEP continues to pay particular attention and be responsive to the emerging capacity building needs of its networks and partners. The CBP will focus on strengthening the capacity of its networks and partners and enhancing the web-base database to integrate a customized version of incident and situation reporting system. Enhancing the early warning database will facilitate systematic and structured field reporting as well as interactive, real time analysis and visualization of baseline measures for conflict prevention. Besides, gender perspective has been absent from early warning and preventive response systems. It has been noted that the indicators of the on-line situation report are not gender-sensitive enough. The inclusion of gender-sensitive indicators is critical to early warning and early response because women are not always affected in the same ways as men in conflict. Thus, WANEP will work closely with ECOWAS to engender the ECOWARN system and conduct trainings on gender analysis of early warning report. The special attention given to gender in the early warning system will provide policy-makers with useful insights on how conflict issues impact on women. [1] FEWER is no longer in existence 2] The five organizations are the Development and Educational Network (DEN), Save My Future Foundation (SMFF), New African Research and Development Agency (NARDA), Association of Evangelicals of Liberia (AEL), and the Rural Foundation for Development (RFD). Back to Top	CBP QUICK LINKS Background WANEP-ECOWAS Partnership ECOWARN: ECOWAS Early Warning System WANEP’s Liaison Office at the ECOWAS WANEP’s Comparative Strength: Network and Membership WANEP Trained Monitors Challenges of CBP
West Africa Peacebuilding Institute (WAPI)
Women in Peacebuilding Program (WIPNET)
Civil Society Policy and Advocacy Program (CSPAP)
Capacity Building in Conflict Prevention, Peacebuilding and Good Governance (CBP)
Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (RM&E)
Justice Lens (JLP)
Early Warning and Early Response (WARN)

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