After being confined at the “Ecole des Officiers de la Gendarmerie National” for three months as a group due to the Covid-19 pandemic, forty-seven gendarmerie officers of seventeen African countries successfully concluded the Council of Europe’s, Regional Training of trainers First responders’ course on cybercrime and electronic evidence gathering. The five-day course was conducted within the framework of the Global Action on Cybercrime Extended project (GLACY+), in collaboration with the Organization of African Gendarmeries (OGA) and the French Gendarmerie.

The training was conducted for the first time virtually, with trainers and speakers connecting from Switzerland and Romania and the forty-seven officers and two French instructors from Dakar, Senegal. Since the start of this Regional training programme in 2016, over 230 Gendarmerie officers of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinee, Equatorial Guinee, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Central African Republic, Togo and Senegal were trained as first responders’ instructors.

The programme offered an opportunity for a constructive exchange between representatives of participating countries and confirmed Senegal as a regional hub for capacity building initiatives on cybercrime and electronic evidence.