Mali: "Liberalism in two days"

Modibo Doumbia, Vice President PCR, Werner Nowak, FNF Project Director West Africa, Ousmane Ben Fana Traore, President PCR More than 40 PCR members from all over Mali gathered in Bamako at the end of April. They attended a compact seminar on liberal values and ideas. The office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for West Africa in Dakar, Senegal, conducted the event exclusively for the PCR, a member of the Africa Liberal Network, ALN. The training was the first of its kind in Mali and received widespread attention in politics and the media.


Workshop participants Inputs on liberal values and basic liberal positions alternated with workshops where the participants developed and discussed their experiences and positions. They later presented their group results in a plenary session for further intense discussion. Topics treated in this highly participatory environment comprised: liberty of the individual (and inextricably linked to it: individual responsibility), rule of law, market economy, private property, human rights, human dignity.


Nowak, Bamako The Bamako seminar was the first of a whole series of seminars that will be conducted by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in francophone West Africa in 2011. In addition to its knowledge oriented character, the event served to identify trainer candidates for the foundation. By the end of the year, a core group of around twenty trainers, mainly from ALN member parties, will be selected out of several hundred seminar participants from francophone West African countries. They will be trained to work for FNF in their own countries and sub-regions.

A very similar process, albeit on a national scale, takes place in Ghana. A core group of trainers will be identified and qualified to conduct seminars on liberal topics in Ghana and in other anglophone countries of the sub-region towards the end of the year.


Trainer Dieguy Diop This train-the-trainer model has been successfully tested and implemented in Senegal. In 2009, the Dakar office started with the first selection seminars. Since then, more than 300 candidates have been scrutinized. Today, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation disposes of 16 highly motivated and skilled Senegalese trainers that will work in the country and the sub-region. Two of those completed their first assignment during the Bamako seminar for PCR in a brilliant manner. The other 14 new trainers will be put to the test during a roadshow in May, when FNF conducts a series of seminars on liberalism in eight different Senegalese cities, touring the whole of the country during three weeks.

On the occasion of the training seminar, talks about the future cooperation between the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and the PCR were held between FNF and the PCR executive.

Werner Nowak, FNF Project Director West Africa

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