Experiences and vision on NGO security management

By Andrea Bos

Over the past months several interviews have been conducted with different security advisors about their experiences and their vision on NGO security management.

Although each individual has their own experiences and view on NGO security management, there were similarities too.  This blog post highlights the issues commonly addressed by the interviewees.

Security Culture

All security advisors stress the importance of security culture. Implementation of security policies and procedures can only be successful if people are aware of the security risks involved in their work and are willing to display responsible and security aware behaviour. People become more security aware by experiencing an incident, but security advisors have found other ways to deal with the abstractness of risk and to create this awareness before anything serious happens to their colleagues.

Organisational Identity

Before deciding on the security policies of an organisation, several security advisors addressed the need to first decide on the organisation’s identity and core mission. Having a clear idea of your organisation’s mission and identity are essential to define the organisation’s ‘risk appetite’ and the manner in which the organisation deals with threats and associated risks (mitigation strategy). It is important to have a clear idea on this, as this will form the basis of security policies.

A balance needs to be found between the risk profile of the organisation and the world becoming less safe. NGOs will want to continue their work, while at the same time there are limits to the willingness to accept certain risks. Similarly, a lot of NGOs identify themselves as neutral and impartial, but aid work is increasingly politicised, making traditional mitigation through ‘acceptance’ harder to achieve.

Duty of Care

Organisations have a duty of care towards their staff members and security advisors must not fulfil that duty alone, but should be supported by management, organisational and HR structures. Organisations will have to budget for security, even though this is becoming increasingly difficult with the current tighter budgets across the board.

There are different ideas about how far the duty of care goes. A lot of NGOs have security policies that also apply to staff when they are not on duty, while others see this more as a guidance and leave it up to the individual what they do during their time off.

How the duty of care is organised, depends on the organisation. Sometimes local offices have responsibility for staff that is working or travelling in their country or region, while in other organisations this is more centralised . It also depends on the organisation to which extent duty of care is fulfilled at all, although the majority of the security advisors see a trend that organisations are more focused on fulfilling their duty of care.

Acceptance strategy

Traditionally NGOs prefer to use an acceptance strategy when working in developing countries, but this is becoming increasingly difficult. Support among local population is not guaranteed and displacement of communities weakens the acceptance strategy as a way to keep staff safe. This means that NGOs will either have to adapt their mitigation strategies, or they will have to accept the increased risks in doing their work.

Conclusion

Although each NGO has a different identity, is working in different areas of the world and has different projects and programmes, there are also similarities in the challenges they face and the focus points of their policies. The interviews that have been published over the past few months, show these similarities and show the rich body of knowledge of all advisors combined.

Two observations can be made on the basis of these interviews.

Firstly, creating security culture and awareness among staff and management is crucial, but difficult.

Secondly, the rising number of incidents and the world becoming a less safe place create new challenges for NGOs for which answers and solutions are not always readily available.

To start with the first observation, as is indicated before, a lot of security advisors mention the importance of a security culture within the organisation. All of them also indicate that creating such a security culture is difficult. The question then arises why this is the case. Firstly, it might be that security is considered to be abstract and far away, especially for those who are still preparing for their work in developing countries.

Secondly, security policies can be considered as secondary to the actual work done in developing countries, which means that it does not have top priority. Moreover, security procedures can be perceived as sometimes limiting. It requires time and effort that can not be spend on the primary goals of a programme. It can be hard to realise that abstract risks can become very real and jeopardise a project. It is challenging for security advisors to make it as much as they can part of the primary work process and to create the awareness that security should be part of everyday work and not something secondary to that.

Lastly, individuals sometimes have a different risk perception than the organisation or security advisor and this creates resistance to accept the extra workload of security procedures.

Regarding the second observation, the newest annual report from Humanitarian Outcomes shows that the year 2013 has set a new record for violence against civilian aid operations. The 79 humanitarian deaths in 2014 so far is already exceeding the number of humanitarian deaths in 2012.[i]

The increased lack of safety in the world challenges NGOs in multiple ways. It requires them to look for adjustments or alternatives for the acceptance strategy and in some cases it requires a discussion as to whether the risk profile of the organisation needs to be adjusted.

The neutrality and impartiality is no longer always accepted by beneficiaries and that makes  that NGOs have to find new ways to mitigate threats towards their staff and programmes. This also affects the risk profile of an organisation. Each NGO has to find the balance between doing their work and dealing with the increased risks involved in doing so.

Next to fulfilling their duty of care and, when necessary, adjusting security policies, sometimes a choice needs to be made in order to maintain the balance between risk and programme goals. Are you, as an organisation, willing to take on more risk or are you going  to adjust the goals of your programme(s) in order to maintain the same risk profile. While answers for this new reality are not always easy to find, it seems unlikely that the trend of the more dangerous world will be reversed anytime soon.

[i] Humanitarian Outcomes, ‘Aid Worker Security Report 2014 – Unsafe Passage: Road Attacks and their Impact on Humanitarian Operations’. http://www.humanitarianoutcomes.org/sites/default/files/Aid Worker Security Report 2014.pdf