Training the Trainers - Women only Civil Military Relation / Human Rights Training Programme

Among other topical issues in the Nigeria security landscape, the role of women in security sector reform and governance remains a salient yet growing topic within the country. Nigeria has by far the lowest number of women in the Security Sector Governance space. Women involvement in this sector in Nigeria is beginning to grow as more women are becoming ever more conscious about decisions taken by those who head the security desks.

Human rights and Civil Military Relations (CMR) are leading discourse that is popular with relevant stakeholders, including security experts, academics, policymakers and CSOs. This is induced by the continuous abuse of human rights by both the military and law enforcement agencies and vice versa.

Abuses of women evoke deeper emotions than others due to their peculiarity with reference to both physical, social, and economic dynamics, and more importantly general social perceptions. Hence, the need to pay more attention to women rights, has become paramount. Furthermore, the need to get women actively involved in civil military operations cannot be overemphasized. A veritable means of achieving this is to get women actively involved in security sector governance space.

While the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Nigeria had a standby faculty of trainers; which had developed manual for the human rights and civil-military relations (CMR) training module and had trained members of the military to up to 250 multipliers in seven streams from 2021 to 2022 under the Security for All Project sponsored by the European Union; it was important that a women only civil-military relations trainings is led by women themselves.

As one of the concrete outputs of the CMR project is the creation of the National Women Platform on Security Sector Reform and Governance, which had been achieved following the work done by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Peace and Security Competence Centre (PSCC) in Dakar, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Nigeria intends to partner with the women for the deliver of the Women Only CMR Training in Jos and Lagos. Hence, there was need for a Training of Trainers (ToT) to enable efficient knowledge transfer between the existing faculty and the women platform members. The ToT session was attended by twenty-five members of the national women platform, from which a women only training faculty was selected.