Bolgatanga, May 18, GNA - The National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) on Wednesday organized a day's capacity building workshop on conflict prevention, management and resolution for selected participants in conflict prone areas in the Upper East Region. The training workshop was on the theme, 93Sustainable Peace for Sustainable Development", and it was sponsored by the Sustainable Peace Initiative (SPI) Project. It attracted stakeholders from the security agencies, the Media, Assembly members and traditional authorities. The Upper East Regional Director of NCCE, Mr Peter Mensah, in his welcome address stated that for the past few years, the SPI in collaboration with NCCE had been working on how to help address the numerous violent conflicts in the three Northern Regions.

He said NCCE together with SPI had identified flash points of conflict areas including communities such as the Sherigu, Gonno and Beo among others and have mapped out peace programmes including training, audio visual drama shows, radio discussion on peace promotion, conveying peace messages on stickers and fliers. "The selected communities have been identified to be occupied with menacing land and demarcation conflicts which can possibly erupt by a potential trigger", he said. He appealed to the participants to put into practice the knowledge acquired on conflict prevention, management and resolution at their respective communities to help address the issue of conflict. Mr Mensah said one of the major setbacks to the development of the three Northern Regions was as a result of conflict and stressed on the need for people to be well informed and to stay away from conflict.

Reverend Father Thaddeus Kusaah, who facilitated the training workshop said there was the need for players in conflict management and resolution to deal with the root causes of the conflict instead of dealing with the surface causes. He said one of the major reasons why conflicts were still persisting in the Northern parts of the country was that the root causes of the problems had not been dealt with. "The major problem to deal with in times of conflict is to deal with needs, values, interests and goals of the parties involved in the conflict"

He stated that just like the North where there were numerous cases of conflict, the southern sector also had such cases but they were resolved without using violent means and appealed to the stakeholders to educate their community members not to use violence in settling their differences. He said because of conflicts, numerous development projects had been taken away from the Northern parts of the country. He said if that trend is not stopped, the Northern part would continue to lag behind in terms of development.