UNOAU in collaboration with the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) provided technical and financial support to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in the design, development and validation of a training curriculum on Protection of Civilians (POC) for ECOWAS Peace Support Operations (PSOs). Held from 5 to 11 April, the learning and design workshop took place in response to several calls for ECOWAS to develop its own training curriculum for POC based on its unique response to armed conflicts in West Africa. ECOWAS has not yet developed a POC Policy for its PSOs and relies on the POC guidelines developed by the AU in 2012.

The objective of the workshop therefore was to develop a draft ECOWAS POC training curriculum for the training of civilian, military and police personnel preparing to deploy into ECOWAS PSOs, to increase their responsiveness to POC in armed conflict. The workshop was attended by personnel from the Directorate of Peacekeeping and Regional Security (DPKRS) of the ECOWAS Commission, AU Peace Support Operations Division, Nigeria National Defence College, Kofi Annan International Peace Keeping Training Centre and UNOAU. It is expected that the curriculum will be finalized and piloted in June 2022 with participants from the ECOWAS Standby Force.