Project to Support the Operationalisation of the Training School for Legal Professions (EFPJ)

The Project to Support the Operationalisation of the Training School for Legal Professions (EFPJ) aims to build the capacities of the EFPJ to fulfil the functions attributed to it by its status.

The project’s action is based on three components:

1. Improving the institutional, governance and management framework of the EFPJ.
2. Strengthening the competencies of the staff of the EFPJ, its trainers, course tutors and judicial officers.
3. Developing and improving educational training tools for judicial personnel.

The Training School for Legal Professions was set up in 2018 to provide vocational training to judicial personnel: magistrates, judicial officers, clerks, student educators and certain liberal professions (notaries, bailiffs, auctioneers).

The project is helping the EFPJ become an organised structure with sufficient material and human resources in both number and quality. To this end, the mobilisation of short-term experts for the school’s staff will:

• Develop an organisation chart taking into account the new missions of the EFPJ;
• Propose new statutes taking into account the specific characteristics of the structure;
• Prepare a development strategy and, through it, the objectives that the EFPJ aims to achieve by 2025, while allowing it to establish its legitimacy and essential nature among the judiciary and executive bodies;
• Create innovative management and monitoring tools tailored to the needs of the management team;
• Design appropriate budgetary and accounting tools;
• Define a communication strategy in line with its future ambitions.

The school will be set up in Abomey Calavi in the 1,600 m² of refurbished premises. This project will assist with taking charge of these premises in order to increase the capacity to receive trainees and provide the EFPJ team with an appropriate working environment.

The members of the teaching staff will acquire new techniques in initial and in-service training. They will be transferred to them by their peers through:

• The training of trainers;
• The design of training catalogues and the corresponding models;
• Exchanges of experience with a reference judicial training centre in the subregion and/or Maghreb region, which will strengthen the school’s partnerships abroad and permanently establish it in the regional landscape of judicial training.

The increased capacity of training operators will be deployed among judicial professionals through 20 in-service training activities organised by the EFPJ.

Training tools and materials for trainers and their learners will be prepared and adapted to the new subjects.

To ensure the sustainability of this work, a system to evaluate the training will empower the EFPJ for the regular and continuous monitoring of the quality of the teaching methods and content.