CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

Our experience and highlights? At the very start of our process, we conducted a needs analysis to identify the training needs and goals that the curriculum would address. This involved understanding the broader educational and training context, institutional goals, and the specific needs of the country’s investigators and prosecutors regarding financial investigations. Part of our analysis involved reviewing existing documents, including existing curricula, which helped us to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. Effective curriculum development required of us to collaborate with educators, subject matter experts, and other stakeholders to ensure that diverse perspectives were considered.

Expectations? One of our main hopes and expectations is that we will create a curriculum that will align with the educational goals and standards of Tanzania, to ensure that the trainees who will use this curriculum will receive high-quality education which will prepare them for challenges in financial investigation. We also hope that this curriculum we are developing will lead to positive learning outcomes for trainees and will enhance their knowledge, skills, and capabilities in financial investigation. this curriculum is expected to include a commitment to ongoing evaluation and improvement, ensuring the curriculum remains relevant and effective over time. Its the expectation of this curriculum will be flexible and adaptable to accommodate changes in educational trends, technology, and the evolving needs of trainees and society.

And our challenges? The major constraint was resources, both limited time and budget. It was real a hard task for team Tanzania to engage senior officials of the key stakeholder institutions to set aside funds for facilitating the exercise.

Our experience: This process of developing a financial investigation training curriculum has been very rewarding and has provided another platform for the entire Uganda team to improve our skills and knowledge in curriculum development in general.

In September 2023, Uganda, in the company of Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia was invited to a forum in Mombasa Kenya to develop a financial investigations training curriculum for law enforcement agencies in their respective country. We were happy to take this invitation up and to get working on  curriculum that would equip our Ugandan Law enforcement officers to handle investigations and prosecution of financial crimes better.

By December 2023, each of the participating country is expected to have developed its own training curriculum and later be able to implement and use it as expected.

Our Challenges

This has been a good learning process for us, however we encountered some challenges along the way, mainly;

1. Internet connectivity which affected our ability to seamlessly follow the guidance from the technical experts since some of the sessions were conducted remotely via Zoom
2. We feel that the time allocated for the entire process is not adequate to come with a comprehensive and user-friendly curriculum.
3. Although the working together of the four select countries is a good idea, this at times meant taking a long time for the countries to agree on certain issues that came up since we have different ways of doing certain things. In some cases, it took a lot time to take a decision on a simple matter.

Expectations

1. A complete training curriculum is expected to have three (3) parts, the curriculum itself, the trainer’s guide/manual and the trainees’ guide. We hope to also be able to develop the other two remaining documents – the Trainers’ guide and trainees’ guide – to make our curriculum complete.
2. We expect that implementation of this financial investigation curriculum will support relevant institutions in our respective participating countries.
3. We’d hope that an evaluation be conducted in our respective countries to test the effectiveness of this curriculum with a view of improving and making it more practical
4. Finally, we expect for the quality of financial investigation to improve through successful investigation and prosecution of all cases related to illicit acquisition of property and illicit financial flows

Our Highlights

For Team Zambia, it has been gratifying that this process of creating a national curriculum has been developed by local experts. And the curricula will be used to train upcoming investigators and prosecutors by local trainers. A big advantage of this exercise is that the developed curriculum takes into account specific country needs and attends to deficiencies that have existed in each country.

For each of the participating country, will be a potent tool in armoring investigators with the necessary tools in financial investigations, asset tracing and asset recovery which are all highly technical. A curriculum on Financial Investigations has glaringly been missing ion all the country, probably explaining why there has been undeterred illicit financial flows in the same countries. So for us, the development of the curriculum is a huge milestone towards the fights against organized crime.

Our expectations? We hope that once we launch our brand-new curriculum in December, it will foster harmony and uniformity among investigative and prosecution wings of the criminal justice chain in Zambia. We also hope that the new document will promote consistency and predictability, enhance inter-agency cooperation, coordination and communication and lead to effective prosecutions and a reduction in organized crime. Finally, our hope is that the curriculum will equip investigators and other LEAs with Financial Investigations and Asset Recovery knowledge and skills which will lead to increased asset recovery and management.

The Challenges we faced in developing the curriculum for Zambia? Getting all the relevant stakeholders in one place; Limited time to collect and analyse data required from relevant stakeholders; Logistical requirements for meetings; and Conflicting work schedules. But in all, we are very pleased with the progress we made and appreciate all the support we have received from different stakeholders to create the Zambian Curriculum on Financial Investigations!

Our experience

Malawi is privileged to be one of the countries being supported by the European Union through the AML-CFT ESCAY Project in various programs including in capacity building. This latest assistance has been the development of a Financial Investigations Curriculum, which is considered a big milestone in the fight against financial crimes in Malawi. Malawi shares in one of the most common and major challenge facing other countries, especially in Africa; Asset recovery. Taking away illicit proceeds from criminals is considered one of the biggest deterrents of criminal activity as it ensures the curtailing of funds and the disruption of criminal networks.

We appreciate that well trained Financial Investigators are a key catalyst to an effective asset recovery regime. Malawi currently has no curriculum for training financial investigators. This exercise of developing a curriculum on financial investigations  will therefore go a long way in capacitating investigators in various Law Enforcement Agencies to conduct effective financial investigations.

From inception, the Malawi delegation has undertaken a few activities towards the development of a national Financial Investigations curriculum specific to Malawi. Our delegation includes officers drawn from various areas in law enforcement including the FIA, DPP and the Police.

In October, the Malawi team of four met with other members from the FIA, DPP and Police Training Department to conduct a needs assessment as well as desk research on gaps and challenges in the landscape of financial investigations and asset recovery in Malawi.

The weeklong meeting involved carrying out a needs assessment on a sample size of concerned stakeholders, the Police, FIU and the DPP’s investigators and prosecutors. The team managed to develop a draft zero curriculum. This very first draft was fine-tuned in mid-November in Mombasa, Kenya during a weeklong curriculum validation workshop for all four participating countries. The Malawi team leveraged on this weeklong workshop to edit the Malawi curriculum to represent best practices while reflecting jurisdictional practices specific to Malawi’s laws and regulations.

Input from experts and academicians in asset recovery and curriculum development has provided a great learning platform for us.

The highlight of this exercise for us? It has been the teamwork that has been displayed throughout; the recognition that the task of asset recovery before us as practitioners depends on a similar team spirit and finally, the networks built through the project which we hope we will all maintain for benefit of our countries.

As with any other task, there has been challenges. The Malawi delegation team faced funding challenges. We managed to conduct a 1-week meeting and reached out to Police, FIA and DPP as the only stakeholders in the needs assessment exercise. In an ideal situation where funding was adequate, the team would reach out to several other stakeholders including financial institutions and conduct more than one physical meeting. Nevertheless, the team appreciates the support from the heads of Police, DPP and FIA.

With the official launch of the Curricula set for December 2023, the team expects to finalise the draft and will launch a final product; the Financial Investigations Curriculum for training Financial Investigators in Malawi. We believe that the curriculum will receive support from the stakeholders and go on to enhance financial investigations in Malawi for enhanced asset recovery. Again the team hopes for continued support from the European Union to see through the work it has started to completion, that is, support of trainings of trainers as well as subsequent national trainings for the stakeholders.