Assigned to the field office in Fishtown, River Gee County, UNPOL Bin Sun from China arrived in the small south-east Liberian outpost with an interesting thought up his sleeves: take the mentoring of his LNP counterparts well beyond standard police routine and practice.

What else could they possibly be interested in? Discreetly, he prodded a few LNP officers, who all expressed the desire to acquire some computer skills. Most had never used a computer before.  Luckily for them, the Chinese UNPOL was well acquainted with a broad range of programmes, applications and software.

After consulting with the Head of the Field Office and the UNPOL Regional Commander, the UNPOL Team Site in Fishtown rolled out a Computer Skills Training Programme starting 13 September 2012 with a batch of 11 officers from the LNP, ERU, BIN, NSA and other Liberian security agencies.

Getting started, though, proved way tougher than Sun had bargained. He had to secure a computer for the trainees to practice on. A projector was also part of the gear and, for this, he had to turn to the County Health Team for support. The challenges were there, but Sun stayed the course, buoyed not only his enthusiasm, but also by the passion and eagerness of the trainees.

The training included an introduction to computer hardware and operation. Participants also took drills in MS Word, Excel, Power Point and Picture Management. They would go off at weekends with home assignments that were discussed in the next session.

Interest in the initiative grew as the weeks went by, with more and more officers asking to enroll.  A second batch was consequently called in on 19 October 2013. Its weekend classes (on Saturdays) had 24 officers in attendance.
Both courses were eventually sanctioned by a written and practical exam. In the end, management at the River Gee field office awarded certificates to 17 deserving officers on 7 December 2013.

“This success came from the participants’ strong desire for self-improvement, combined with the collective efforts of our UNPOLs and the Field Office,” said HoFO Joshua Dapaah-Agyemang at the certificate award ceremony.

He expressed the hope that the newly acquired skills would boost performance among the Liberian security officers.