Strengthening National Institutions and Civil Society Organizations for Effective Conflict Prevention and Peace-Building

The paradox of the African continent is this: At independence in the 1960s, the governance process was characterized by effective leadership armed with vision, strategic planning but crippled by the poverty of a human resource base to transform vision into reality — leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Gamal Nasser, Nyerere, Houphouet-Boigny … had to recreate institutions from the ruins of colonialism and to try to beat a poor human resource base at home into shape, often complemented, as was the case in Nkrumah’s Ghana, by human resource from the Diaspora, to run the state machine.