How to scale up aid worker security

A targeted, yet dramatic rise in kidnappings, attacks and killings of civilian aid workers is prompting some organizations working in crises zones to consider and implement new methods of keeping humanitarian personnel safe and able to continue carrying out their work. Funding isn’t a main barrier blocking aid organizations from ramping up their training and protection, according to humanitarian aid security specialists and non-governmental liaisons. But the ability to successfully implement funding and training, building on communication lines in potentially remote and volatile areas, remains a challenge for some disconnected aid groups. “Donors are very well aware that in order for humanitarian organizations to access populations in crisis environments and insecure, violence-prone environments, they need to have the capacity to manage these requirements and that requires resources,” said Oliver Behn, coordinator of the European Interagency Security Forum. EISF serves as a security network to 50 non-governmental groups based in 14 countries; all of its partner organizations have “ramped up” their security measures in the past few years, Behn told Devex. “Our experience is improving the security of aid workers in highly insecure and violent environments is not necessarily a question of more money from donors. I think it is equally a question of the capacity to actually implement what there is in terms of knowledge,” he explained. Implementation can come in the form of enhanced training and communication. Scaling up security The New York-based International Rescue Committee’s recent security scale-up from an “ad-hoc” system has not created “major issues at our [funding] level,” says Eric LeGuen, IRC’s safety and security advisor. IRC has dipped into its training/learning fund for security training on an annual basis since 2006. It now mandates all staff working in the field, whether national or international workers, receive pre-deployment training, a “more thorough orientation” that takes place within the first 48 hours in the field, and then an additional session within the first month. This system strengthening in the past two years has done away with the notion that “it was understood that staff get an orientation, but that didn’t always happen,” LeGuen said. The willingness of donors to fund security varies, says LeGuen, but he noted that training, in particular, has been singled out as an area donors wanted more effort to be made. “USAID’s”: Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance has, for instance, dedicated funds to security training through RedR, an organization headquartered in the United Kingdom with country chapters which provide training and workshops worldwide at a reduced fee. Randy Martin, director of Mercy Corps’s global emergency operations team, though, says the “funding question is a conundrum.” Though institutional donors are “very quick to say that they will fund security,” they also want to see the majority of their funds going to programs, he explained. Country leaders then have to prioritize operational costs, including the costly factor of preparedness and protection. That hasn’t stopped Mercy Corps from proceeding with launching an enhanced security-training program for workers in early February. “For extreme-risk countries, we’re finishing up a special orientation that is more structured. We have created several modules that a trainer at the field level can choose from, like land mines, sexual assault, or checkpoint management,” explained Marti in an interview last month. “We all agree that we need to step up the formality of our orientation for new staff in certain countries. There’s a lot more targeting of NGOs, and a lot more insurgent warfare going on.” Save the Children followed en suit with a more cohesive training platform when it united its U.S. and U.K. offices with a single security policy and set of standards last February. “That wasn’t in direct relationship to anything except our own trajectory of where we wanted to be on our own,” said Michael O’Neill, Save the Children U.S.’s security director. “The external environment made it seem more urgent, but we were well down that road before. There was a general recognition of the need to be more efficient and to do our job better.” “The donors seem willing to support this and it’s just up to the NGOs to organize themselves,” said O’Neill. Dangerous aid hot spots According to the Aid Worker Security Database, 184 international and national aid workers were killed in 2010, an increase from the 162 workers killed in 2009, which itself was a sharp rise from the 53 reportedly killed in 2000. But Behn, the European Interagency Security Forum coordinator, maintains that it’s difficult to assess an overall rise in aggression against aid workers, as the Aid Worker Security Database reveals several countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo – where the vast majority of attacks on workers occur. “You have to be careful to place it in a larger picture because if you removed these countries from the picture, there would be a very different overall conclusion,” he said. ‘Saving Lives Together’ Communication gaps appear to remain, though, in certain countries between aid groups and between aid groups and United Nations agency offices. As a partial response to this need, the U.N.’s Department of Safety and Security launched a program called “Saving Lives Together” in 2006, establishing a framework for sharing security-related information and materials. Some elements of “Saving Lives Together” are now in place, like the coordination of telecommunications and radio frequencies, which can be “enormously helpful in emergencies,” says Mercy Corps’s Martin, who was involved in the program’s development. “The most important thing is seeing NGOs sitting at the table with the U.N. when there are security coordination meetings, and that is happening across the board more often than not,” Martin said. “Saving Lives Together” encompasses a “huge cultural shift” for the aid community that organizations gradually adjust to as the initiative adds more non-governmental and U.N. liaisons in target areas, Save the Children’s O’Neill said. Pakistan and Darfur are two of the most recent spot placements. “We can promote it as much as we can among ourselves,” O’Neill said, “but if you go to many people in the field, they will not know what it is and that is unfortunate.” U.N. representatives for “Saving Lives Together” declined to comment for this story. O’Neill acknowledged that there isn’t enough diversity in the groups represented at these roundtable talks. “The values we ascribe to are not as universal as we think they are – they are Western, and that puts us at a disadvantage in non-Western environments,” O’Neill said. “There are very few international NGOs coming from a southern or eastern perspective.” Handling security is both a communal and individual objective, as there’s not one foolproof solution for all groups to help them boost their own measures of protection while continuing to carry out their services. “We cannot say, ‘Oh, NGOs should do that or this,’” said Behn, “because it really depends on the NGO. What needs to happen is that NGOs need to carefully look at who they are and what their capacities are to deal with risks.” For comprehensive data on attacks against civil society and U.N. workers, check the Aid Worker Security Database. 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