The sun has set. Another long day draws to a close for security staff at UNICEF HQ, New York. They have deftly worked their way through a series of crises affecting their staff in the field many time zones away. Perhaps the incidents included a simple theft, break-in, or maybe a carjacking or bomb threat. Either way, their years of experience in the field enable these staff to effectively manage one crisis after another. But what of the proverbial lessons learned? Ahh, there's the rub. Like most, if not all, international organizations and non-government organizations (NGOs), UNICEF has yet to translate its commitment to security taken on by so many of its individual staff, into institutional knowledge and hard statistics that can clarify just what the threats and risks are to its field operations.

With so much expertise and so few records we are left to wonder, isn't there a better way? What happens to that expertise in the collective sense? Can and will security staff affect policy and decision makers to better prepare the institution for these events in the long-term? Has the institutional learning required to make progress in the area of security reached critical mass? Will the UN be prepared to move from crisis response to conflict prevention as it openly says it wants to?

If security staff members at UNICEF and other UN agencies are to have an impact on institutional policy, they must be in a position to present decision makers with hard, cold facts about developing trends in the field. The adage, 'knowledge is power' is particularly apt in this context.

Why UNICEF and what status quo are they are coming from?

With years of security and situation reports stuffed in file cabinet drawers and staff increasingly at risk, it became evident in the mid-1990s that something more needed to be done to improve both the means by which UNICEF collected data from the field and the methods it employed to analyze the field security environment. The security coordinator directed his staff to consider automating the process of security incident reporting so that UNICEF could systematically submit information from the field and have a formal means of analyzing that information.

As an intern to the Security Coordinator in 1996 and now as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, I have been involved in exploring new methods for improving the way UNICEF gathers security incident data from the field. Back in 1996, there was very little in the way of automation or standardization in the way incidents were collected and recorded and head-quarters was operating almost exclusively in a crisis mode. This made it difficult for those charged with maintaining staff security to analyze developing trends in the field. There simply was neither the time nor the technical means to do so.

While my focus is on UNICEF's approach to the field security environment, it should be apparent that what is relevant for this organization is equally compelling for other UN agencies and NGOs operating in the field. As an agency operating in 161 countries and deeply concerned with responding to emergencies as well committed to long-term development, UNICEF is at the forefront of humanitarian response and serves as a model for other agencies.

Pulling the problem apart

During a recent evaluation meeting for a newly tested, web-based security incident reporting system called UNICEF Field Reporter, both headquarters and field staff members had much to say about the short-term and long-term needs of the organization. Both suggested that UN agencies, as much as non-governmental organizations, have suffered tremendously from changes in the international environment. Collectively, they feel ill prepared to provide serious analysis of exactly how their respective organizations have been affected. One key is identifying and understanding what obstacles stand between an organization and its ability to meaningfully interpret the field security environment.

The Field Reporter was designed with participation from UNICEF staff at both the headquarters and field level. This has proven advantageous, as an indigenously developed model is far more likely to meet the needs of an organization than one introduced without the active participation of those who will be instructed to use it.

Past efforts to routinely collect systematized data have been met with little enthusiasm. One critical shortcoming of previous models was their failure to fit the structures of the organizations they were designed for. Virtually none of the previous security incident models were designed with the immediate needs and perceptions of the field staff - who would be required to use the system - in mind. One common refrain from the field was that while the system is interesting and might be useful for headquarters personnel, it does nothing for field operations.

UNICEF Field Reporter

The web-based Field Reporter is the product of a detailed assessment of how to meet the needs of UN agencies in interpreting developing trends that directly affect the status of UN staff, programs and assets in the field. The Field Reporter is designed to highlight who did what to whom where and when. The information, which is entered by UNICEF staff in the field, is submitted routinely to headquarters and is accessible by analysts in the form of graphic displays of emerging trends. This gives the analyst broad insight into these emerging trends that can then be dissected back to the level of the original report submitted from the field.

One advantage of this approach is that the analyst does not have to compile large quantities of data from which they have to try to discern what is going on later. Instead, the context-specific knowledge the analyst has in their brain can be employed to discern the meaning behind trends openly manifest by the system itself. This allows an analyst to make an assessment of developing problems, before they explode in crisis.

Consider for a moment the concept of analysis. Some UNICEF staff members, prior to the field tests, suggested that analysis simply was not done while others suggested that analysis was really the product of individual expertise on security matters. One staff member indicated that analysis was the equivalent of remembering what incidents have occurred and trying to determine what the trends are based on that. There was, as another staff member indicated, certain vagueness to the whole process of analyzing security incident reports.

The Field Reporter marks a fundamental departure from the methods of analysis outline above. Analysis can now be conducted on standardized, routinely reported data that is comparable across cases and over time. Those who have a particular knowledge of a country or region can improve their assessments by scanning developing trends and consulting situation reports that might provide further insight into what they already know or might reveal an emerging problem they had not yet been aware of. This is in fact what World Vision International hopes to do with their version of a recently fielded situation reporting system, which I shall discuss in greater detail later in this article.

The results of deploying the UNICEF Field Reporter during four-month field trials (see graph) illustrate several lessons that should be heeded by prospective modelers of situation reporting systems. While field trials were conducted in both Haiti and Colombia, I offer the results for Haiti only. While both Haiti and Colombia reported on incidents reported in the new media (50 for Haiti and 57 for Colombia respectively), only the Haiti office reported on security incidents that impacted UNICEF staff, operations and programs directly (a total of 13 such reports for the four month field trials). This highlights the importance of clarifying reporting protocol for eventual deployment. In particular, there must first be clear and documented protocol regarding the scope of what is to be reported on, who is to do the reporting, who monitors the trends and who is responsible for the analysis of the data. All of this must take into account the structure of the organization itself. A successful security incident reporting system will be designed to compliment the current operations of an organization by facilitating its work. A great system will highlight weaknesses in current reporting methods and provide information about developing trends in the security environment that would shape how an organization approaches security matters and ultimately how it defines its security policy.

Second, in an organization where field offices enjoy a great deal of autonomy, as they do in UNICEF, it is imperative that the output of the system benefit field staff directly. The evaluation of the UNICEF Field Reporter by field staff suggests that both analyses of the security trends be provided directly to the field staff concerned with security. A situation or security incident reporting system would be made even more useful if it highlighted trends developing in neighboring countries as well.

How well did the new model work?

The advantages to headquarters were immediately apparent. The frequency with which security incidents were reported for the two countries where the Field Reporter was deployed increased dramatically.

Another obvious benefit is access to the data. Because previous security incidents have been stored in paper files, they are virtually useless to an analyst wanting to monitor security trends. Routinely reported standardized data, graphically displayed, improves the ability of an analyst to monitor security incidents as they unfold in the field.

Finally, a historical record makes it easy to access and analyze the data. A real shortcoming of previous approaches to security has been the lessons lost about the field security environment. While individual UNICEF staff members have developed a deep and complex understanding of security issues in the field, this experience has not been translated into institutional knowledge. As a result, there is little to know about the accumulated knowledge in the field security environment that might have a profound impact on policy and decision-making. I suspect this is the case for many non-governmental organizations operating in the field as well.

The provision of standardized data that is routinely collected from the field and assessed for trends represents a revolutionary challenge to the current structure employed by most organizations dealing with security. Moving from ad-hoc crisis driven reporting that is only remotely digestible by the keenest of experts might well be replaced by standard data that resides in a database such that the information is open to peer review and can be assessed collectively over time. This represents a veritable sea change in how security and analysis are understood.

Efforts paralleled in the NGO community

Recent events in world politics have encouraged many agencies to focus on security and to review their current capacities and procedures. World Vision International, one of the largest NGOs in personnel and resources worldwide, decided to improve the way it analyzes field security by monitoring threats of terrorism. Like UNICEF, WVI has sought to standardize the methods it employs for collecting data from the field and for analyzing that information to improve its procedures and to bolster its readiness for operations in the field.

The field situation reports used by WVI help clarify what impact that organization's programs are having both on the people to whom it provides aid and on the well being of its own staff. A series of questions are submitted by staff on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis, depending on the status of the country they are reporting from. This data provides analysts at their headquarters with the capacity to monitor the status of WVI programs globally and provides the basis for improving or modifying programs to meet current needs. Monitoring trends also enables the NGO to avoid the cost of having to respond to an emergency by preparing for changes before the fact.

The future

The 21st century promises to be one of increasing security challenges to virtually anyone operating in development and humanitarian aid in emergencies. The humanitarian missions of many UN and NGO agencies no longer provide a shield against violence. In fact, in some instances humanitarian aid workers have been purposefully targeted. If they are to address challenges effectively, humanitarian aid agencies will have to begin to make better assessments of their operating environments. In this respect, at least two important lessons can be drawn from UNICEF's work on automating security incident reporting.

First, it is manifestly imperative that UN and NGO agencies adopt some means of instituting routine, standardized field security or situation reporting. Without this, it will be virtually impossible for these agencies to escape the cycle of crisis response. Crisis preparedness will remain forever elusive without a clear body of evidence against which policymakers can make informed decisions about the nature of the security threat.

Second, much of the conceptual work done on security incident reporting is readily applicable to the design of broader early warning of political instability. The underlying indicators used in the UNICEF Field Reporter represent a concise subset of event forms identified in the events data literature. The system is therefore readily extensible to the work of the UN in its initiative to identify a set of indicators for crisis early warning. If the UN is to ever realize the aspirations of its last three secretaries general for the creation of an early warning system, then work done by UNICEF on field security incident reporting could serve as an applicable model of how to operationalize such a system.

Vincenzo Bollettino received his doctorate in international affairs from the University of Denver in 2001. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs where he is using applied research to foster an improved under-standing of the field security environment among non-governmental organizations.

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