Cameroon DDR Commission Officials Trained On Need For Gender Strategy At Centres

The Minister for the Women’s Empowerment and the Family has reiterated the need for officials of the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) Centres to adopt a gender approach in their operations to reinsert ex-combatants into the society.

This follows an awareness raising seminar organised by the ministry in collaboration with UN-Women which provides technical and financial support to the project for officials of the DDR Committee and some selected ex-fighters.

Speaking while opening the training at the DDR head office in Yaounde, Minister Marie-Thérèse Abena Ondoa, said it is “extremely important to address the issue of gender” because during situations of armed conflicts, when assistance or activities are mentioned, focused is always on men even though women are the highest the suffer during such period.

“If you follow the statistics given by the national coordinator, we have more than 600 cases in the centres in the three regions right now. Out of the 600, we have a little over 100 women and just a little above 150 youth,” she revealed, while underscoring the importance to take to account such gender specificities.

“…planning activities by integrating the gender approach is going to be more effective because in the centre, we have individual ex-fighters but it is good we must know that they belong to a family, a community, have parents, siblings and so it is good to see how all those can be involve when you plan activities,” she proposed.

On her part, the Representative of UN-Women Cameroon, Hind Jalal, recalled that for more than 20 years now, the United Nations Security Council adopted a Resolution that recognizes gender equality as a condition for international peace and security and has since then set up national policies and action plans have been developed to improve the participation of women in peace processes.

It was revealed that by the end of the training DDR officials will see the need to integrate women into all the operations carried out at the centres as well as create enabling environment and a common vision of gender mainstreaming and its priorities within peace building institutions.