The global focal point for aid-work and NGO security will take place this year again: the NGO Security Conference 2010.
You can check out the program here:
The focus of this year is Acceptance. Acceptance is the term for how an organisation works to become accepted and liked by the local citizens, tribal structures or governments in the country they´re in. Good acceptance will nourish a deeper ability to help the local people on their terms and rebuild their society through sustainable development. But it also offers security in that the local people want to protect the NGO and its staff. The focus for this year´s Conference is the limits and possibilites good Acceptance will offer aid-workers. Due to the bad security-situation in the field, many NGO´s are turning towards using more armed security and increasingly tougher layers of external security around their facilities. There are trade-offs with this, and it´s easy to go looking for protection or deterrence when the situation looks bad instead of looking harder at increasing the subtler skills of Acceptance. Acceptance has many facets. Very important is that it has a different level of strategic effect, including the strategic narrative that an NGO puts out into the area it will work, and how the aid-workers present themselves. The techniques for this are many, and will layer into how an NGO views its strategic outcomes in the future. The techniques for how you create this is part of the work we do here at Small Change when we help NGO´s increase their Acceptance.
Among the highlights at the Conference is the workshop with Suzanne Williams, a very well known hostage negotiator who will talk about her work in the Metropolitan Police Hostage Negotiation Unit and about the great work she does in helping kidnapped NGO staff to get released as fast and as safely as possible. NOTE: Soon to come here on Small Change is the pdf on our courses for how your staff can handle a hostage crisis as smoothly as possible in the critical time between when it´s happened and before the professional negotiators arrive. This course is unique and has never before been offered aid-organisations. We are very happy to be able to offer it, as we now live in a world where kidnapped aid-workers are becoming a more and more common occurence.
You will be able to read an article with photographs about the Conference here on SC Blog.
Take care out there
Daniel
