The National Transformational Leadership Institute (NTLI) with support from UNDP-Peace and Community Cohesion project organized a 10-days training of County Peace Committee. The training took place from 11th to 21st November 2022 in Fangak County, Jonglei State. The training brought together 6 payams of Fangak County and the two town councils were also represented. The payams were Old Fangak, New Fangak, Paguer, Manreeng, Toch, Pulita, Manajang and Barbuoy payams. Most participants were drawn from County Administration, business community, youth, traditional leaders, women League and Women association and religious leaders as well as County community members.
The overall objective of the training was to build the skills for peace committees in transformational leadership, sexual gender based violence, conflict resolution and peace building. Adult learning techniques were employed which allowed participants to fully contribute to knowledge and reflect on peacebuilding, leadership, human rights and gender. The learning was experiential and engaged participants in individual task, group task, case stories, interactive lectures, experience sharing, role plays, demonstrations, illustrations, simulations, guest speakers and brainstorming among others.
The topics covered included transformational leadership, uses of power, non-violent means of conflict resolution abuse of power, gender based violence, power of influence, public speaking, credit and collateral, Money and wealth.
During the training, it was gathered that in Old Fangak, there are serious issues on GBV such as rape cases and child defilement by relatives but perpetrators are allowed to roam free in the town due to lack of space for imprisoning them. Similarly, women are not allowed to do business in town because it is an indication that their husbands have been unable to fend for them. They expressed need for training on economic empowerment and they requested for specific-group trainings like women only, youth only, leaders only, etc. Participants said that they had not been taken through such comprehensive training previously.
From the observations made, another training is recommended targeting youth on peace building in order to minimize insecurity caused by cattle raiding in the county. Further, women need a tailor-made training especially emphasizing on four key areas, peacebuilding, GBV, economic empowerment and leadership. This came as a result of continued requests from women throughout the session and also as an observation made by the facilitators that women also are perpetrators of insecurity through inciting their sons to engage in violence in return for blood compensation to benefit the families.