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What Inspired WAPI

In 1997, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), the Nairobi Peace Initiative (NPI-) and the Institute for Justice and Peacebuilding in Virginia, USA collaborated to conduct five sub-regional capacity building workshops in peacebuilding for Western, Central and Eastern African regions. During these workshops participants raised key concerns for peacebuilding training activities in Africa. Some of the issues included the following:

“Do the many peacebuilding training workshops in the continent structure the contents of their courses to address the contextual realities of Africa?"

"Are there long-term, systematic courses in peacebuilding that are building communities and forming coalitions to address African problems?"

Such long-term training courses could afford those practitioners who may not have the means to attend elaborate courses in Europe or America access to similar training in their own context at lower cost.

"Do the courses offered in Africa have research components that inform the contents and structures of the courses about emerging issues and challenges of peacebuilding in the continent?”

Inspired by the above concerns, The West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), in collaboration with its strategic partners, the Catholic Relief Services-West Africa Regional Office and the Institute for Justice and Peacebuilding of the Eastern Mennonite University, launched the West Africa Peacebuilding Institute (WAPI) in 2002. WAPI seeks to offer training opportunity to a wider number of practitioners and interested persons across West Africa. WAPI will constantly undertake research studies to understand indigenous resources within West Africa that are relevant in responding to contemporary conflicts. Through this research, mechanisms will be developed to integrate existing models with local models, without disempowering or undermining the latter.