Foreign Affairs Minister calls for adequate funding to address conflict and terrorism in Africa

The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey has asked the UN Security Council to ensure there is funding across the peace continuum if they are to achieve any measure of success in addressing the protracted and complex of conflicts presently confront.

Speaking at a high-level open debate of the Security Council on “Integrating Effective Resilience Building in Peace Operations for Sustainable Development”, Madam Ayorkor Botchwey also called for the need to operationalize the Council’s agendas on youth and women, making them essential pillars of the United Nation’s support for resilience-building towards defeating terrorism and violent extremism.

She said women and youth face peculiar challenges in their communities as they are disproportionately impacted by conflict and violence.  She noted that according to UNICEF, three out of ten young people, many of them girls, are out of school in conflict-affected countries.

“As a Council, we have a primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Getting right the balance of the instruments we deploy for peace operations is critical for ensuring that the peace we seek is  sustained across the world” she indicated.

She said Ghana is concerned that the resources devoted to programmatic interventions of peacekeeping missions are dwarfed by those devoted to kinetic operations. The 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (The HIPPO report) had noted that, “changes in conflict may be fast.

Outpacing the ability of UN peace operations to respond”. That sustainability gap now threatens current peacekeeping missions as a number of host countries of
peacekeeping missions turn to interventions by outside forces, while at the same time limiting the mandate of peace missions.

The Foreign Minister said the Council has to rise up to its mandate and deal with the critical recommendation from the HiPPO Report on the need for new modalities to deal with terrorism and violent extremism, the emerging threats to peace and security in our world today. The threats to international peace and security continue to multiply everyday, every day that no action is taken.

Madam Ayorkor Botchwey said they are even more concerned that poor countries shoulder the burden of addressing the socio-economic and political complexities and challenges that drive the rising levels of terrorism and violent extremism, while at the same time bearing the cost of the kinetic operations needed to defeat the terrorists. She added that integrating effective resilience building in peace operations has to be a central preoccupation of the Council, if it’s to remain a credible guarantor of peace and security.

“Our capacity to deliver lasting peace and security rests on our ability to understand and address the underlying conditions for conflict, as much as our ability for conflict management” she noted.

She expressed hope that the debate will lead to a process that transforms the peace operation model to respond to the current conditions.