German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock continues her two-day visit to West Africa in Ivory Coast.
The Green politician was welcomed at Abidjan airport on Tuesday by Foreign Minister Léon Kacou Adom after his trip from Senegal. A meeting with President Alassane Ouattara was scheduled for later.
After meeting Adom, Baerbock will learn about the training of civilian and military security forces at an international counterterrorism academy about 35 kilometers outside Abidjan, where she will witness a simulated liberation of a Sahel village from terrorists.
Germany is contributing €2.5 million to finance the training centre’s infrastructure and has also provided money for a jetty.
The academy trains specialists from the civil, police and military sectors in crisis management and counter-terrorism, with an emphasis on tactics and hostage rescue. The special GSG9 unit of the German Federal Police also trains there regularly.
Ivory Coast is located on the Gulf of Guinea and with approximately 30 million inhabitants is the economic heavyweight of French-speaking West Africa. It is also the largest cocoa producer in the world.
Like its Sahel neighbours Ghana, Benin and Togo, the country is threatened by spillover Islamist terror from Mali and Burkina Faso, where militant groups are spreading, especially in the border regions.
The Sahel is considered the region most affected by terrorism worldwide. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the region will account for almost half of the world’s victims of terrorism and a good quarter of all terrorist attacks in 2023. The cited causes include the expulsion of France, the EU, the United Nations and the US as security partners.
The German government wants to continue its involvement in the fight against terrorism in West Africa in states ruled by military juntas.
Development Minister Svenja Schulze, chair of the region’s largest donor platform, the Sahel Alliance, announced an education initiative for more than two million boys and girls on Tuesday. More than 40 percent of children there can no longer go to school because of the threat.
“Education is one of the most effective antidotes to the recruitment efforts of terrorist groups, because education offers young people prospects,” Schulze said at the end of the Sahel Alliance meeting in Berlin. “We rely much more heavily on local authorities and non-governmental organizations,” Schulze said. “Yet we also want to maintain dialogue with the states that carried out the coup.”
