Commandants of Police colleges, academies and schools in Eastern Africa seek to harmonise the curricula of the major regional police colleges.
The network formed during their meeting in Kigali on January 25, brought together commandants from South Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and Rwanda.
It was in line with the directives of the 17th council of EAPCCO police chiefs held in Naivasha, Kenya that directed continuous and harmonized skills development of law enforcement agencies for effective policing.
Commandants of Police colleges, academies and schools in Eastern Africa, established a new network that would come up with mechanisms of harmonizing police training modules as means to jointly counter contemporary and cross border crimes.
The meeting was held under the auspice of Eastern Africa Police Chiefs Cooperation Organization (EAPCCO), a regional body that brings together 13 countries.
While presiding over the meeting, the Inspector General of Rwanda National Police, Emmanuel K. Gasana noted that the contemporary crime trend should match with our training because the way we train is the way we perform.”
“We need to move away from the traditional training and align it with currently policing demands. Today, criminals are using asymmetric concepts and available tools to destabilize our nations. Therefore, the responses, prevention and approaches that we have to apply should match with the new trends,” said IGP Gasana.
To fix the gaps in career training, he said, there is need to hamonise and standardize policing activities.
Although it might not be possible to harmonize all areas or customize all the training modules at the moment, he emphasised the need to cooperate in specific areas, have standard generic training modules that will be agreed on as EAPCCO so as to have common understanding of the approaches, concepts, standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement, among others.
Gasana told the commandants that there is need for a mutual understanding in ensuring working together. noting that cyber-crime is to be one of the areas to have harmonized training modules.
“EAPCCO recommended that each member state establishes a cyber-crime unit – this is very important since that the unit will support scientific evidence when it comes to investigations. There are many crimes that are connected to cyber, starting from human trafficking, money laundering and terrorism. This means we should have advanced training in computer skills,” IGP Gasana said.
The formed network will be endorsed by the council of EAPCCO Police Chief in their upcoming general assembly to be held in Tanzania later this year.
“This kind of association that is about to be established will be a framework to address issues of the changing times and facilitate understanding of the required modern equipment, the skills required so that we are ready to confront the security challenges,” he said.
Judy Jebet Lamet, the Commandant of CID training school in Kenya pointed out that the region is experiencing sophisticated crimes that cannot be addressed independently, but rather collectively.
“We have crimes that is crosscutting, there is massive use of internet so people are able to communicate to perpetrate crimes, spread hate speeches, to commit gross financial crimes, human trafficking, narcotics and terrorism; we need to have a uniform and modern approach to combat these crimes,” she said.
“From this new mechanism, we will be able to tap from each country’s best practices and be able to work out a strong harmonized strategy,” Lamet said.