Project Director’s Message
It is a great pleasure to communicate with you through this website. Through it, we will now reach you quickly and with more elaborate and comprehensive contents.
While it will give the Anti-Money Laundering – Trafficking in Human Being (AML-THB) project visibility, it will also, above all, show what we have done, what we are doing, what we are going to do and why we are doing it. The AML-THB project, funded by the European Union Trust Fund (EUTF) and implemented by the French CIVIPOL operator, started modestly with 9 countries in the Greater Horn of Africa (GHoA), plus Yemen. Today, we have grown to cover 16 countries, and soon, several observer countries may join us soon.
Beyond the success of this project – thanks to your feedback – we hope that this website will be an opportunity for our partners and participants or even interested visitors, experts and the media, to meet, exchange and deepen their bilateral and multilateral relationships. We also hope that it will help to acquire a holistic vision of the fight against Anti Money Laundering-Counter Financing of Terrorism /Trafficking of Human Beings, which is indispensable in a 5.0 data era.
This website is a means for us to be accountable. We take this as our duty, essential to us because it is based on a notion of mutual trust with the national institutions and agencies we are working with in the Greater Horn of Africa, who entrust us with their personnel. It is therefore our duty to report to them on the good performance of the project activities, on what their personnel achieve, but also, how their personnel evaluate each activity.
This website will document and allow the participants of our activities to find the elements of exchanges they enjoyed during training, beyond the ad hoc WhatsApp groups created during these trainings by our communication team.
The website greatly expands the possibilities of exchange between insiders and also those outside the Anti-Money Laundering/Countering Financing of Terrorism-Trafficking in Human Being (AML/CFT-THB) Project. Our plan is to expand even more these possibilities of exchange over the coming months.
The Project Newsletters have been uploaded on this website and will henceforth be uploaded as we publish them. The articles in these newsletters will not only be accessible but will also allow you to directly contact their authors.
Each time I speak during a session, I always mention that one of our main goals is to facilitate the exchanges between the different national partners, both at practitioners’ level, but also at the level of decision-makers at national level. I also underline our aim to facilitate the exchanges between the representatives of the institutions of the different countries of the geographic area this project covers. It is our fundamental hope to achieve this, which, we think, will make “the going a little bit better”. This objective, which we achieve during the training activities, is one of our greatest satisfactions.
This success is also due to good teamwork: Lucky leader, I have the best team possible and Federico, Tuemay, Alma, John, Ruth, Faith and Richard share with me this satisfaction.
Our objective and approach for this project is not grandiose or grandiloquent: we remain with our feet on the ground and realistic to our participants’ needs; to support them in their difficult daily tasks through interactive activities tailored for their specific paradigms. This objective benefits from the contribution given by international and regional institutions with whom we partner regularly in the framework of some of our activities.
At every session, our participants are our “VIPs”. We all have something to contribute to the common good fight against Trafficking in Human Beings, Transnational Organized Crime, money laundering, tax frauds and capital evasions; crimes that drain the economies of our countries through corruption and impoverish crucial social structures like hospitals, education, cultural and human development.
This is the modest ambition of our project. Together, united in solidarity, with modesty, honesty and persistence, we will make progress.