The President of CESRAN International, Professor Alp Ozerdem is to be honoured with one of Nigeria’s foremost peace awards at a ceremony in Washington.
Alpaslan Özerdem will receive the International Peace Medal of the Peace Corps of Nigeria (PCN) in recognition of his lifetime achievements and outstanding leadership in the field of peacebuilding.
Professor Özerdem has also been invited to attend the 70th United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York.
The Peace Corps of Nigeria (PCN), accorded a special consultative status by the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), is a non-governmental and uniformed youth organization that focuses on working with the youth in getting to know them, their personalities, their dreams and aspirations, their fears, their failures, their successes and their passions with a view of building, harnessing and redirecting their productive energies towards the Socio-economic and Political advancement of the Nation.
Founded by a youth strategist, Amb. (Dr.) Dickson A. O. Akoh, FCITr, FCPA on the 10th of July 1998, in the Ancient City of Kaduna in Northern Nigeria, the PCN, in its commitment to National Creativity, Peace and Youth Development is registered in Nigeria under the Company and Allied Matters Act of 1990, Part C. After dissipating a lot of energy into research work in a bid to enforce a functional and sustainable growth in youth development and re-orientation, Akoh observed that Nigeria hitherto is endowed with one of the best human and natural resources where the youth could use and attain their full potentials. He however identified the absence of a comprehensive and practical orientation programme which will serve as a social mechanism towards their meeting modern day challenges. This, in his findings, constituted an impediment to the positive development of the Nigerian youths. Hence he took the historic step of forming the PCN with its motto as Discipline and Patriotic Services.
