The Africa Enlisted Development Strategy was announced at the 2018 Africa Senior Enlisted Leader Conference, which took place Oct. 16-19, 2018, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Twenty-five African partner nations participated in the event, hosted by U.S. Africa Command.

During the inaugural Africa Senior Enlisted Leader Conference in 2017, many partner nations asked for help with professional military development.

“The second Africa Senior Enlisted Leader Conference was designed as a follow-up on some of the requests from our African partners from 2017,” said Chief Master Sgt. Ramon Colon-Lopez, Command Senior Enlisted Leader, U.S. Africa Command.

The Africa Enlisted Development Strategy was designed to create low, to no cost initiatives for inter-African training to minimize Africans needing to travel to Europe or the United States to get professional military education, he said.

As part of the strategy, AFRICOM will utilize several efforts such as mobile training teams and the Department of Defense State Partnership Program to help enhance African professional military education institutions.

According to Colon-Lopez, developing a professional military non-commissioned officer corps is vital to a military’s success.

Many of the senior enlisted leaders attending ASELC have never met before so sharing their experiences, challenges and successes allow them to learn from each other, Colon-Lopez said.

“From our standpoint in the United States, we can bring all sorts of great ideas to the table, but many of them may not make sense to the Africans,” he said. “When an African speaks from their experience, it resonates a lot more and it’s extremely powerful.”

Read more about the strategy on our website: https://go.usa.gov/xPnZm