Gender desk officers of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), have benefitted from a capacity building workshop organized to improve their performance on the job.
The workshop which was funded by the UNDP, under the Spotlight, Initiative of the European Union, was organized by Centre for Women’s Health and Information (CEWHIN). Director of Administration of CEHWIN, Mrs. Atinuke Odukoya, said the purpose of the training was to further equip law enforcement agents to be able to handle cases of gender based violence and know what their referral pathway is.
“Today we are working specifically with the NSCDC. We did a joint training for them with the police and the LNSC. We realized that this is a group that relate with survivors of SGBV within the community but they haven’t been trained much in terms of what are the proper way to handle such cases and we get a lot of referrals from them just because some of them were part of the previous training we held. All the officers that you see here are gender desk officers for the NSCDC Lagos State. This training is like intimating them on issues around SGBV.”
One of the trainers, ASP Kenneth Okafor Emegwamor, said: “If we must get results, officers must be trained. From what we had from the participants, the office was just newly created and for officers who are going to work in that department they need to have the knowledge of what they are expected to do.