NGO safety and security training project: how to create effective security training for NGOs
Security training is the most common security measure in the sector and one of the least evaluated. This project examined what makes training change behaviour, and why so much of it does not.
Download the research (PDF, English)What the project found
Training was being delivered widely, in volume, by a mixture of in-house staff, commercial providers and former military trainers. Almost none of it was evaluated against whether staff behaved differently afterwards. Where evaluation existed it measured satisfaction, which correlates with whether the trainer was engaging and not with whether anyone learned anything.
Four findings shaped the recommendations.
Content was generic. Courses covered a standard syllabus regardless of where the participants worked. Staff returned knowing the principles and unable to apply them to the road outside their office.
Training was treated as an event. One course at induction, then nothing. Behaviour changed briefly and reverted, because the arrangements around the person had not changed and the organisation did not reinforce any of it.
Managers were not trained. The people who decide whether a journey happens, whether a team is deployed, and whether a concern is acted on received the least training of anyone, and their decisions determined the outcomes.
National staff were trained less. Despite carrying higher and more sustained exposure, national staff were less likely to attend courses, and the courses they attended were more often delivered locally and more briefly.
What effective training looks like
- Built from the participants' own context. The hazards the participants actually face, the routes they actually use, the decisions they actually take. Generic scenarios produce general knowledge.
- Practised rather than described. A rehearsal of a communications tree, a checkpoint procedure or a first response teaches more than a session explaining it, and it also tests whether the arrangements work.
- Reinforced on a schedule. Short refreshers at intervals, plus a briefing before each deployment and a debrief after, which together matter more than the initial course.
- Directed at managers as well. A separate module on the decisions managers take, including the ones with legal and financial consequences, and the requirement to record the reasoning.
- Evaluated against behaviour. Whether staff use the procedures, whether the communications tree is tested, whether concerns are raised and acted on. Not whether participants enjoyed it.
- Delivered to everyone the organisation exposes. National staff, drivers, guards and partner staff, on the same standard as international staff, with the training budget showing it.
The organisational condition
The project's most important conclusion is that training cannot compensate for an organisation that has not decided anything. If there is no security plan, no risk assessment and no position on what staff should do when a journey becomes dangerous, training produces people who know what they ought to have been given. The first investment is the plan, the second is the training, and reversing the order wastes the money.
Related
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.