Citizen Security: CLA to Strengthen Evidence Based Decision Making in the Caribbean

Crime, and its resulting violence, is a multidimensional issue that plagues all societies even the seemingly idyllic shores of the Caribbean. When you consider youth involvement in crime, another layer of complexity is added which is not easily remedied. It was realized that the failure of public policies to address youth crime and violence has been largely due to a lack of standardized, disaggregated data with which to understand the dimension of the problem and monitor interventions. To address this lack of informed policymaking, USAID collaborated with UNDP to create the Strengthening Evidence Based Decision Making for Citizen Security in the Caribbean (CariSECURE) project in 2016 to target 8 Caribbean Countries.
This multi-country intervention required an intense collaboration, learning and adaptation (CLA) approach to address the organizational and developmental challenges the project faced. However, even though CLA was not intentionally embedded in CariSECURE’s design, the CLA approach was adopted and was crucial to achieving the project’s intended outcomes. Key subcomponents such as: Knowledge Management, Adaptive Management, Collaboration and Pause and Reflect to name a few, proved to be beneficial to the project’s long-term goals which are categorized in 3 outputs:

Output 1: Standardized and disaggregated crime data reporting within and among national authorities to foster the reliance on valid, reliable, and comparable data on citizen security.
Output 2: Utilization of evidence-based analysis of crime data to inform citizen security strategies, programs and policies.
Output 3: Improved decision-making on youth crime and violence based on available evidence at national levels.