A five-day training on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) has opened at Fiapre in the Sunyani West Municipality of the Bono Region.

The Marian Conflict Resolution Center (MCRC) of the Catholic University College of Ghana (CUCG) is organising the training for the clergy, legal practitioners, academia, and other professionals as well as representatives of private and public institutions.

It seeks to empower more than 100 participants with the requisite skills to do professional mediation and conflict resolution.

Facilitators include Ms Diana Asonaba Dapaah, a Deputy Minister, Attorney General and Ministry of Justice, Mr Gyan Owusu, the Coordinator of the Ghana School of Law, Kumasi campus and Reverend James Kwasi Annor-Ohene, a Catholic Priest and Visiting Scholar, Fordham School of Law and Parochial Vicar, St. Ann Catholic Church Yonkers, United States.

Others include Father Thomas Oppong-Febiri, a Catholic Priest, who holds a PhD in Canon Law and a graduate of the Fordham School of Law, Mr. George Kafui Agbozo, a lecturer at the CUCG and practising mediator of the Judicial Service and Mr Alex Nartey, the National Coordinator of ADR for the Judicial Service.

Dr (Mrs) Vida Korang, the Executive Director of the MCRC, explained the Centre was established a decade ago to train more professionals, certified and licensed them as mediators and arbitrators to actively affect the ADR system in the country.

Since then, she explained more than 600 certified mediators and 60 arbitrators spread across the country had been trained to support ADR practice by helping to resolve conflict situations around them.

Dr Korang, also a facilitator and a lecturer at the CUCG, underlined the importance to pursue ADR development at the national level in a multi-dimensional concept, encompassing the economic, social, institutional and physical elements of development.

"In this wider sense, it would be relatively easy to effect the necessary changes for a truly effective development system," she said.

Professor Daniel Obeng Ofori, the Vice-Chancellor of the CUCG, noted conflicts would always happen whenever two or more people meet or gathered, saying it was, therefore, imperative that professionals were empowered to position them well to resolving conflicts.

He expressed the hope that the training would impart participants with the required knowledge that would enable them to go back and impact positive changes at their work places and in the larger society.

In a speech read on his behalf, Most Reverend Matthew Kwasi Gyamfi, the Catholic Bishop of Sunyani Diocese, noted that mediation remained a herculean task and advised the participants to take the training seriously by participating fully to enable them to acquire the needed skills and abilities to become functional in the nation's ADR system.