The Office of the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for the Great Lakes Region (OSESG-GL), in partnership with the Regional Centre on Small Arms (RECSA) and with the support of the United Nations Peace and Development Trust Fund (UNPDF), has successfully convened a Regional Workshop on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) and Weapons and Ammunition Management in DDR Contexts (WAM-DDR). Held from 2 to 4 November 2026 at the African Union Commission Headquarters in Addis Ababa, the workshop advances the OSESG-GL SALW Project — “Reducing the Human Cost of Weapons in Africa.”
In opening remarks delivered on behalf of H.E. Xia Huang, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for the Great Lakes Region, H.E. Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, Special Representative of the Secretary-General to the African Union and Head of the United Nations Office to the African Union (UNOAU), commended the achievements of the OSESG-GL SALW Project in its first phase and reaffirmed the critical importance of United Nations–African Union cooperation in controlling small arms and light weapons.
Nearly 40 participants attended, representing the 15 member States of RECSA — including the five member States of the Contact and Coordination Group (CCG) — together with the United Nations and leading SALW control experts. The workshop gave national policymakers, technical experts and programme officers of international organizations a dedicated space, under the Nairobi Protocol framework, to exchange hard-won lessons on regional SALW control. The discussions will also feed directly into the second phase of the UNPDF-supported OSESG-GL SALW Project.
On behalf of OSESG-GL, SALW Project Management Officer Ms. Xinyue Cao presented three pioneering innovations at the heart of the Project:
1. A data-driven monitoring model. Building on Secretary-General António Guterres’s UN 2.0 digital transformation agenda and its data-driven vision, OSESG-GL has harnessed open-source data to build an interactive dashboard tracking SALW control across the Great Lakes region — enabling Member States and partner organizations to see precisely where help is most needed.
2. A multi-dimensional training system. Through an engaging SALW educational video series, in-country Training-of-Trainers (ToT) capacity-building, and sustained follow-up training, the Project has created a holistic, “teach-a-person-to-fish” model that builds lasting national capacity rather than delivering one-off instruction.
3. A regional cooperation mechanism under the CCG. OSESG-GL has helped establish a SALW Working Group that deepens cross-border cooperation on arms control — strengthening the region’s ability to tackle cross-border arms trafficking and laying an institutional foundation for inter-regional law-enforcement coordination.
