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Imagine you're a security officer at an international aid agency. You've spotted Wednesday's news of a rebel attack on aid workers arriving at a remote airstrip in Congo's troubled east. Thankfully, on this occasion, they came to no harm, having fled into
Imagine you're a security officer at an international aid agency. You've spotted Wednesday's news of a rebel attack on aid workers arriving at a remote airstrip in Congo's troubled east. Thankfully, on this occasion, they came to no harm, having fled into the bush before being rescued. But you want to know what other violent incidents have occurred in the past year involving foreign NGO staff. Where do you go?
Until very recently, you might have had to cobble the information together from various U.N. and other aid agency contacts and reports, backed up by a thorough media search. But the launch of an online database of major security incidents involving aid workers has just made your task a whole lot easier.
It has been put together by researchers with consultancy Humanitarian Outcomes, who decided to make their statistics available on the internet after tracking them for and since the release of a major 2006 study, which sparked strong interest among aid practitioners, policy makers, academics and the public.
The Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) records major incidents of violence against aid workers - killings, kidnappings and armed attacks that result in serious injury - from 1997 through to the present.
The plan is to update it on a weekly basis with information gathered from public sources and aid organisations, which will be cross-checked with the relevant agencies on a quarterly basis. Currently information up to the end of 2009 has been verified, and that for 2010 remains provisional.
The database certainly contains enough detail to make it a very useful tool - not just for people in the aid sector, but journalists too.
The information can be filtered by year, month, country, type of institution (United Nations, international NGO/INGO, local NGO, International Committee of the Red Cross/ICRC etc), national or international staff, and the tactics used in the attack (ambush, bombing, kidnapping, sexual assault and so on).
So what would you find if you checked the numbers for Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the past couple of years? You'd see there have been two serious incidents so far this year - one in which eight ICRC employees were abducted, and one in which a local staff member of an INGO was wounded.
No killings of aid workers have been reported in DRC since September 2009, but four national staff of different INGOs were killed in 2008, and two in 2009. There was a particularly nasty incident in January 2009 when eight INGO staff (three national and five international) were seriously hurt, including sexual assault, during a raid and robbery on their house in Goma.
The database gives brief details of each incident, including who carried it out in some cases, but does not provide the names of the staff or aid agencies involved. The website says this is out of consideration for the victims and their families.
The website has been up and running since World Humanitarian Day on August 19, and the team behind it says they would welcome feedback on how to make it more useful.
For me, as a journalist, I'd like to be able to see totals at the bottom of the different columns, so I can make quick and easy comparisons. At the moment, you can download the data tables in a spreadsheet and do your own sums, but I'm probably not the only one out there who's not much of a whizzkid in that respect, and would appreciate the database doing it for me!
Humanitarian Outcomes partner Adele Harmer told AlertNet they'd like to revamp the website early next year incorporating people's suggested improvements, and are planning to publish a new briefing analysing numbers and trends every six months on the site.
Up to now, the team's reports have been rather irregular because of time and money constraints, but an update on the final figures for 2009 - perhaps also looking at tentative results for 2010 - is due in a couple of months' time.
INSECURITY HOTSPOTS
So what are some of today's big trends in aid worker security? You'd be forgiven for thinking it's getting worse everywhere, but according to Humanitarian Outcomes, that's not the case.
In a March report available on the AWSD website, the researchers say security has only been declining in a small handful of highly-charged conflict environments - Afghanistan, Somalia, Darfur, and increasingly Pakistan and Chad. Excluding these, casualty figures for aid workers in the rest of the world have declined slightly over the past few years rather than surged.
But in those high-insecurity environments, the tactics of violence have become more sophisticated and lethal, with a rise in politically motivated attacks and incidents affecting international staff - especially kidnappings. The pattern is of increasingly politicised and indiscriminate violence against the international aid enterprise in general, the report says.
"Humanitarian actors, unable to effectively shake the 'Western-ness' that characterises so much of the aid enterprise, have become proxy targets of choice for those seeking to strike at the Western powers or to sow fear and instability in order to advance their agenda," it observes.
That leaves aid agencies with few and unappealing options, it notes. Should they stay or withdraw? And if they stay at considerable risk to their staff, how can they best provide aid to needy populations? Many organisations have come to realise that pulling out foreign personnel and managing operations remotely simply transfers the risk to local staff who may have even fewer resources to protect themselves.
Harmer says it's relatively easy to budget for, and put in place, 'hardware' security measures like armed guards and barbed wire around compounds, but much harder to pursue 'software' strategies like gaining acceptance among local actors and communities so an agency can operate in relative safety.
"Aid agencies are investing in acceptance strategies now, but it requires money and time, and doesn't happen quickly. They might invest between six months and two years so they can get a security guarantee without even putting any programmes in place," says Harmer.
Yet in emergency situations - as with today's floods in Pakistan - they may not have the luxury of time. Nor, in some cases, are major donors willing to let the agencies they fund to talk to groups they regard as their enemies, and certainly not publicly.
Humanitarian Outcomes hopes the online database will help highlight key trends, support enhanced dialogue between aid agencies and donors, and encourage organisations to strengthen their reporting mechanisms and capacity to analyse security situations.
"We want to give the aid community an evidence base on which to have these discussions," Harmer explains.
**For an analysis on the security of aid workers in Pakistan click
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