A successful approach in Central Asia

All images by Karen Wykurz for Saferworld.

An external evaluation of Saferworld's work in the cross-border area of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan has highlighted the benefits of our approach to community security. The evaluation commended our strength in enabling communities to identify and come up with their own solutions to local security problems.

Understanding whether our programming is effective in achieving its aims is crucial to the ongoing success of our approach. An example of this in 2013 was an independent evaluation we commissioned of our community security programme in the Ferghana Valley - an area of Central Asia affected by ethnic violence - where we have worked since 2010. Over 60 key stakeholders from communities, Saferworld staff, partner organisations, the police, and local authorities were interviewed and a thorough assessment of our research publications and monitoring and evaluation reports was conducted in order to learn from our work. The evaluation highlighted achievements, lessons learned, and recommendations to make our work more effective in the future.

Our programme aims to identify ways to change the roles, behaviours, and relationships of authorities, civil society, and communities, especially to increase cooperation between these actors and to make people feel safer. The evaluation found strong evidence that Saferworld's approach - conducting in-depth assessments of the needs of local communities and working alongside committed local partner organisations - has ensured that the programme has taken into account the local conflict context and has been designed around it.

The evidence also shows that our activities are having an impact at the intended community level. A prominent piece of feedback was that a unique strength of Saferworld's programming has been the establishment of community security working groups, made up of representative local community members, providing them with the tools and skills to analyse their safety and security concerns, and facilitating them to find solutions to their concerns. As locals identified, previous projects in the area have tended to be driven by external actors' agendas, rather than the security concerns of local people themselves.

"Before outsiders would come and push us to work on problems they had identified" says a community security working group member in Madi, Osh. "But the difference now is that we live in the community, we discuss and identify our own problems, and develop our own actions to respond."

The evaluation also highlighted that the emphasis on engaging and empowering local communities around security was strongly needed, given the communities' historic lack of awareness about their civil rights, and the consequential lack of engagement in civic activism.

Communities visited for the evaluation demonstrated the motivation and confidence to consult and represent their members - and take action. They have built sustained relationships across community divisions and have engaged with the police and local authorities. Community security working groups have demonstrated a sense of responsibility and a strong desire to work on more complex security issues to improve the situation of their communities. The wider impact of our approach to date was also noted: neighbouring communities are interested in participating in the project, and Saferworld plans to roll it out more widely.

We have shared these findings within Saferworld and externally to feed into wider debates on community security effectiveness. As Saferworld expands the Central Asia programme, and links our community work to national policy changes, we will work to make improvements that were highlighted in the evaluation. For example, we will do more to ensure marginalised groups are represented on the community security working groups, and strengthen engagement between these groups and local authorities who should be seen as partners, not barriers, in the provision of community security.

"The single most distinguishing factor in the success of the programme so far is probably Saferworld's commitment to genuine empowerment of its partners to find their own course; while still providing intensive support and challenging them rigorously to achieve the standards Saferworld has set."

Independent evaluation, 2013