More than 20 members of parliament in the Eastern Equatoria State assembly are attending a three-day training on governance, peace, and conflict resolution in Torit town.
The training which started on Thursday is organized by the Whitaker Peace and Development Initiative (WPDI) and attended by 26 MPs.
Nadege Magdaline, the lead facilitator at the WPDI told Radio Tamazuj in an exclusive interview that the training aims at empowering the legislators to manage conflicts within their constituencies.
“This is to train the honorable members of specialized committees on peacebuilding, and conflict resolution for them to be able to help in decision-making within the assembly and even policy implementation and to support their communities in terms of peacebuilding, conflict analysis, conflict mapping, and conflict management,” she said.
Kokol Michael, the chairperson of the information and communication specialized committee in the state assembly said peace and conflict resolution remains a major challenge in the state.
“This leadership, peacebuilding, and conflict resolution training is very important for members of parliament as it gives more knowledge on how to solve problems both within themselves and communities they are representing,” Michael stated.
Hellen Hope Awor, Deputy Speaker of the state assembly urged fellow MPs to preach peace and development not conflict.
“Let us take the knowledge that we are going to get from here seriously such that when we are going to our communities we speak the language of peace, we speak the language of development. Let us try to avoid conflict, in our world, in a way we relate, with people and generally with our communities,” Hope said.
For his part, the speaker Severino Maira Janus Speaker appealed to communities to shunt violence and embrace peace.
“MPs are more connected to the population, we need you to acquire the knowledge so that you can go and spread the knowledge so that our communities live in peace. What we are interested in is to see that our communities are living in peace,” he said.