Last October, members of the Bureau’s Montreal office visited their colleagues in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso to support the development of training tools for professionals in contact with children.
Two training kits (a set of tools and guides for comprehensive child rights training) are being developed in Burkina Faso: one for Judicial Police Officers and the other for the Penitentiary Security Guard.
Workshops were held in 2019 to assess the needs of these professionals and to gather the content for each training session. The content was then structured and organised with the support of the Bureau’s pedagogy specialist, in collaboration with experts in the field, to produce a complete course in line with the objectives set for each profession and the skills to be acquired.
One part of the mission was also devoted to the creation of audiovisual tools to support these trainings, in order to make them more dynamic and lively. These tools include short situational videos, allowing participants to better visualise the situations in which they would have to adapt their attitudes and actions towards children. Thus, for the Judicial Police, these tools will cover topics such as questioning or searching a child, while for the Penitentiary Security Guard, they will focus on childcare or assistance to a child victim of violence.
An audiovisual tool on the subject of gender that cuts across all the Bureau’s activities in Burkina Faso is also being discussed. The goal is to illustrate situations that are contrary to the traditional expectations associated with each gender through short videos, in order to create a dialogue and stimulate reflection on the Burkinabe social and cultural norms and the stereotypes and traditional roles associated with each gender.
These two training kits should be finalised during the year 2020, and will be integrated into the initial or continuing training courses for the professionals in question.