Africom tool helps advance women, peace, and security

A new tool recently developed by U.S. Africa Command (Africom) is being used to measure progress in advancing women, peace, and security (WPS). The assessment tool was developed by Cori Fleser, Africom’s gender advisor, to better integrate WPS efforts into Africom’s security cooperation activities.

Africom has made strides to better incorporate WPS activities when working with African security forces, however, integrating WPS into existing military planning, execution, and assessment processes is still a challenge. Fleser’s assessment tool uses open source data sets from international organizations such as the United Nations and World Health Organization to craft tailored approaches to working on WPS implementation through security cooperation activities.

While the tool has its limitations – the data used can not provide a full picture of WPS efforts – Fleser says that it is useful to security cooperation planning in that it will point Africom in the right direction. Says Fleser, “It does not provide a binary good/bad assessment of African partner nations. Rather, it enables the command to better understand how gender influences the security sector using quantitative data to support that analysis and opens the opportunities for working together with our partner nations to advance a mandate critical to achieving our mutual security objectives.”

For more information about the WPS SFA tool, please follow the link below.
Africom Develops New Tool to Measure Women’s Progress, Department of Defense