Peace efforts seriously hampered

Peace-building efforts in Africa face considerable constraints, including inadequate funding and poor management, a conference heard on Thursday. Patrick Mazimhaka, the vice-chairman of the African Union (AU), told a key meeting on peace building in Addis Ababa that such constraints had hampered efforts to effect conflict resolution. Mazimhaka's comments came at a seven-day conference funded by the German government as part of the UN Development Programme's peace-building strategy aimed at strengthening Africa’s regional capacities and strategies for conflict prevention, peace-building and post-conflict recovery. Sam Nyambi, the UN's country representative in Ethiopia, told delegates that better management and increasing financial support were critical to effective peace-building initiatives on the continent. "Many good programmes and projects have come to naught simply because skills in these areas were lacking or there was too much dependence on external expertise that became too expensive to maintain," he said. Nyambi said the UNDP project aimed to promote peace-building initiatives by way of "economic development, cooperation and integration" and mobilising civil society. He also observed that regional cooperation was vital in "conflict prevention and post-conflict recovery security issues, policies and systems". Gen Cheick Oumar Diarra, the deputy executive secretary of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), commented that poor management had hampered the community's efforts to raise international funds in support of its initiatives. ECOWAS oversees peace and security in the region and has been at the forefront of efforts to resolve the conflict in Liberia. "I must confess that one of the weaknesses of ECOWAS has been lack of capacity in programme design and management," he said. "We had problems with the European Union and some other donors, primarily because we lacked the requisite capacity to utilise and manage the resources put at out disposal even though we were determined to succeed." The AU agreed earlier this year to set up a UN-style body empowered with new competencies to enable it to tackle the continent’s wars and resolve conflicts. The new Peace and Security Council will be able to intervene in conflicts and will soon be conjoined with an African peacekeeping force.