Measuring Safety and Security

Recently, The Bridge network has been involved in creating a guide that offers an approach to measuring people’s perceptions of safety and security and the impacts – both intended and unintended - of an intervention. This MSS approach is designed for use in South Sudan.

During and after conflict, aid workers and UN agencies design interventions to help improve people’s safety and security, however this can be hard to measure due to ambiguous concepts that can easily be politicised, especially in contexts of crisis.

MSS prioritises the understandings and perceptions of people and communities that interventions aim to benefit.

The MSS does this by prioritising those who experienced conflict and takes into account the role that politics of safety and security plays in these contexts. It not only records the everyday, but also the episodes of more serious armed conflict and violence. To do this, MSS draws on a combination of qualitative, ethnographic and quantitative tools.