As part of the partnership arrangement between ACCORD and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Sweden, ACCORD participated in the Top Level Seminar on Peace and Security – TOPS, entitled “Challenges to Durable Peace after War in Africa”.
The seminar took place in Uppsala from 7-16 May 2008.
Since 2007 ACCORD has served as resource persons to the training course.
This year besides ACCORD’s Founder and Executive Director, Vasu Gounden, who presented a session on “Dealing with Threats to Peace Implementation”, which focused on looking at practical examples and ACCORD’s experience, ACCORD also provided two additional resource persons to the course – The General Manager: Operations and Business Development, Pravina Makan-Lakha (who presented a session on “Mitigating the Security Dilemma: African experiences of PKOs, DDR, and SSR”) and the Manager of ACCORD’s Knowledge Production Unit, Angela Ndinga Muvumba (who presented a session on “The AU and Conflict Management: A Review of the last five years”). In addition to the above resource persons three ACCORD Staff members also participated in the course.
While in Sweden Mr Gounden had meetings with Sida representatives. From Sweden Mr Gounden travelled to London where he had a series of meetings related to fundraising for ACCORD’s Africa Peace Centre (APC), accompanied by ACCORD’s UK based Global Development Manager for the Africa Peace Centre Project, Sean Callaghan.
