JOHANNESBURG, 21 September 2007 - Peacekeeping missions in Africa are hampered by difficulties in generating forces and a shortage of funding, a senior United Nations official said on Friday.

Nick Seymour, senior political officer with the UN's peacekeeping department, said getting enough troops to conflict zones such as Somalia and Sudan's Darfur region, where a struggling African Union peacekeeping force should be bolstered by UN soldiers next year, would always be a challenge.

"The number of troops have done an outstandingly good job (in Darfur), bearing in mind the size and scale of what they are trying to do and the numbers they have actually got there," he said at a briefing on the continent's peacekeeping capacity.

"Of course that is now recognised in the size and scale of what UNAMID is going to be and that is a much larger mission."

The establishment of the new hybrid UN/African Union force would be high on the agenda of a high-level consultation by ministers from 26 countries on the margins of the 62nd session of the UN General Assembly on Friday.

The joint AU-UN peace force is expected to see 26,000 troops fully deployed in Darfur by mid-2008, taking over from nearly 6,000 under-equipped and underfunded AU troops.

Peacekeeping missions in other African countries such as Somalia, where only Uganda has so far contributed troops to a long-promised African Union stabilisation force, have also been negatively affected by similar problems.

"Very closely linked to force generation is the question of funding and logistics. You can generate troops but if you can't equip them, they are not going to be able to do their job properly."

"If you look at the range of African troop contributors and what major ones are contributing, they are very stretched," he said.

The United Nations oversees a number of military operations in Africa, including in the Democratic Republic where some 17,600 troops are keeping the peace after a devastating civil war.

Source: AFP