Radio Miraya
2708: UNMISS Child Protection Capacity Building Workshop
Unmeshed Child Protection Units in collaboration with the SSPDF Child Protection Directorate and the SPLAI/O Child Protection Unit will lead a coordination from the NDDRC and we'll be discussing about that shortly. Stay tuned. Good morning. [Music] Well that brings us to only a quarter past 8am. Well let's continue with the conversation. Well the Unmeshed Child Protection Unit in collaboration with the SaaSDA and People's Defense Forces Child Protection Directorate and the SPLAI/O Child Protection Unit will lead a coordination from the NDDRC and they will conduct a 3-day Child Protection Capacity Building workshop from April 23rd to April 25th, technically starting from tomorrow. And this is for senior officers from the moral orientation, operation and military intelligence with the SSPDF SPLAI/O and also the SAWA in JUBA. Well the training is designed to equip participants with the necessary knowledge to implement the action plan effectively and to also inculcate the culture of child protection and accountability. All to know more about this workshop we joined in the studio with Unmeshed Child Protection Officer John Chull Dang and on line is Oluku Andrew Hall to the NDDRRC director of Child DDR. Good morning Oluku Andrew thank you so much for joining us. Good morning Aaron Masu and thanks for having me this morning on the right hand. Right and Oluku you are joined with John Chull Dang who is from the Unmeshed Child Protection Office. Yes John welcome to the program. Good morning and thank you so much for welcoming you to the program. Right so I will start with John. John just tell us more about this particular workshop. Thank you very much. First of all I would like to start by saying Unmeshed Child Protection to work to support the practice to the conflict to ensure that the action plan to week they have signed to end all the violation against children rights is implemented fully in the country and how do we do this? We do this through training capacity building of the forces and of the senior military operation officers as well as the intelligence officers. The purpose of this training is actually to equip the participant with the required knowledge and skills on child rights to implement the comprehensive action plan and to advocate for accountability measures in line with the action plan and to ensure that SSPDF and SPLAIO as well as SOA learn and understand the sixth grade violation, the impact on children and the monitoring and reporting mechanism. All right thank you so much. Now Oluku what are the main objectives for this workshop? Thank you there are a number of objectives for this workshop but the main one I can mention five or six of them. As you are aware we are implementing the comprehensive action plan. This is actually extended then this time is the that extension action plan regarding the services and armed groups or regarding children affected by armed conflict. Now one of the objectives is to equip the participant and this participant comes from I/O as you mentioned earlier. SSPDF and SOA. This particular work is to equip them with the required knowledge and skills on child rights to implement the action plan that I'm talking about and then the second is to advocate for accountability measures in line with the action plan. You know within the action plan there are a number of provisions and one of them is accountability. The start is for the participant to learn and understand the sixth grade violation. Now we have the sixth grade violation out of course killing and maybe children. Right. Children and youth and children, sexual violence against children, abduction of children attacks against schools and hospitals or occupation of public places, in order to have an action in contact of war or conflict war or conflict. The start is to illustrate the importance of ensuring that children are not associated with the enforcement. You know during wartime children are not always victims and now that our forces have been trained and they are being reunified. We need them to understand and to ensure their protection under the unified command forces. And also to identify the activities in the action plan. As I mentioned there are a number of activities. There are a number of provisions to be implemented within the policy institutions including the administration and the security organs and the role that they had to play to protect the government. Right well a local thank you so much for bringing us the speed. I'll come back to you and to share with us the challenges. But for now Joel what are the long-term goals and outcomes that you hope to achieve through this capacity building in your partnership with the DTR? Thank you very much for that question. As you may be aware South Sudan is one of the countries listed for violating children rights. And this means that they cannot be delisted from the annexes of the UN Secretary General for that. And one of the requirement for them to be delisted is actually the implementation of the action plan that they have signed. So there the possible outcome of this workshop is actually to enhance capacity of the participant especially SPAIO, SSPDF and SOA to recognize, prevent and respond to chirite violation and abuse promptly. This is the national duty. No one should actually put them. The action plan is their document and at the end of the day we wish them to be taking the SOA responsibility of the document. Two is that the awareness raising sessions will increase the knowledge and understanding of the role and responsibilities of the military offices in the implementation of the action plan. Thank you. Right. Thank you so much for that. Now Oluku, what are some of the key challenges that you anticipate in promoting child protection within the military and how do you plan to address them during this workshop? Well, some of the challenges, we may not address it during the workshop, but we have to either take a minute to look into it. But one of them, you know, to implement an activities like funding. So we have been relying on support of the UN country that supports the monitoring and reporting in the UNICEF unit. They are lack of funding, make it so difficult for us to implement the action plan, because the government has to do support in it. And then in security, you know, some parts of this country are in conflict and they are from a whole lot that are from the area. So especially for us, the government has been difficult to reach out to those locations. Yeah, but the challenge is now looking at the action plan. You know, the UNICEF action plan was fine on the 7th of February 2020 and we have spent a great time now. But the latest one, the threat extension, we just expanded on that. It was still in October 2020. Now, we need because it has been going slow. We need to complete the approaches, especially the participants that we are bringing again. We need to identify whatever this we want to see this complete, so it's child-free. Right. And we can provide some respect. All right. Gentlemen, thank you so much for making our time to speak to us this morning. Oluku, before I let you go, what is your last remark? My last remark is the action with the government action plan regarding children as a straight-to-down country. It's not to be implemented by some of the institutions that we have mentioned. It is, as old, we have all these stakeholders. Do you the media houses? Whoever is outside there, we need to go in the hand. It should be a joint venture. See that the action plan is fully implemented within this time frame of 18 months. All right. Oluku, Andrew, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. All right. And Oluku is speaking on the line. He's the NDDRC Director of Child DDR, who will be part of the workshop that will be beginning tomorrow. And John Cho, what is your last remark? Thank you very much. My last remark would be calling on the government, actually, to take the implementation of the action plan seriously, because what it means is that when the action plan is implemented, the action plan is terminated when it is fully implemented. And then this is for the entire country. It's not for the SSPDF. It's not for the SPLAIO or SOA, per se, but just to say for the entire country. And when we are delisted from the lease of shame, South Sudan depend force will be able to participate in the global and peacekeeping mission, just like any other true contributing country that we have in South Sudan. So we need the government to finance the implementation of the action plan and to support the National DDR in actually leading all these processes. Okay. Well, John Cho, thank you so much. a fair time. Thanks.