A United Nation’s peace mission in The Gambia over the weekend reaffirmed its continued supports to government in strengthening human rights, transitional justice and peace building in the country.

The team is made up of experts from some of the main donor countries – Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ireland and Belgium.

In January 2017, the UN deployed a high level inter-agency mission to The Gambia after a consultation with the Barrow-led government.

And the mission assessment was based on the challenges to peace development and human rights and identified possible areas of United Nation’s support based on government priorities.

Meanwhile in 2017, the Peace Building Fund approved 3.1 million Euro to support the transitional justice, security sector reform and policy coordination. It is also the main sponsor of the Truth Reconciliation and Reparation Commission.

Speaking at press briefing during the weekend at UN house in Bakau, Gert Rosenthal, member of the Peace Building Fund Advisory Group, said: “we found this exercise useful in other countries and we found it particularly useful in The Gambia which appeared very recently due to the events of 2017.”

An official of UK’s Department for Foreign and Commonwealth office in London, Sarah Lampert, said the UN mission on peace has engaged the government of the Gambia, civil society and other stakeholders in order to hear from them about the ways of strengthening peace in the country.

She described peace building as a unanimous task while commending the role of stakeholders.

Meanwhile, another seven million dollars ($7m) was disbursed to the country in December, 2018.

Reporting by Adama Makasuba