Planning Staff Safety in Complex and Fragile Environments

Introduction

We went to speak at AIDEX 2021 Conference, Its fundamental aim is to engage the sector at every level and provide a forum for humanitarian aid professionals to meet, source, supply and learn. AidEx was created to help the international aid community engage the private sector in a neutral setting, drive innovation and support the ever-growing need for emergency aid and development programmes.

Our MD Dan Hooton, Senior Security Advisor Darren Kelly and I all took part in an Impact Session as part of the Development 2030 section of the conference. In our presentation, we discussed Duty of Care, how to define it, how to plan for it and look at what risk means to the individual as well as an organisation.

We will be sharing this presentation in a series of articles here on the website which will also be complemented by our newly launched podcast series ‘ Whose Duty of Care is it Anyway’?

In the first in this series Dan Hooton, our MD explains what risk means and what factors might influence your organisations Duty of Care platform.

What is the Risk?

Deaths from terrorism have halved, although there are the usual areas we would expect in Sub-Saharan Africa and Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, there is a marked spread down into South East Asia and up into Eurasia.

Natural disasters or nat cat kill on average 60,000 people per year, or equivalent to 0.1% of global deaths.  with changing weather patterns, climate change, extreme weather events, we are seeing a greater spread of risk, perhaps this doesn’t mean death and injury to you or your staff, but it certainly means disruption.

Finally, road traffic accidents, are the biggest issue I have to deal with on a day to day basis (one client has had three fatalities in as many months), and the magnitude of increased risk here you can see, is huge, 1.35 million people per year.

Risks I haven’t included are activism and civil unrest, political disruption, crime, I could go on but nonetheless, all relevant risks need to be considered when making your assessment. I could also mention covid, but I see that more of a multiplier of which I am going to come on to later, rather than a risk per se to be managed.

The risk hasn’t gone up, but it is more unpredictable and prevalent in a wide range of locations, driven by the activity and profile of those travelling. so we have to be more aware, and flexible to deal with a wider range of issues. For all potential incidents or crises, you must have a response – it’s no longer acceptable to say we didn’t consider that, or we weren’t aware that might happen.

What are Risk Multipliers?

By multipliers, I mean factors that expose us to greater risk whilst we are operating in remote or complex environments than we would normally experience on a day to day basis if for example carrying out your normal commute:

• Mode of transport – we have touched upon road traffic accidents, but also consider the use of airlines, and in particular regional airlines, in emerging markets, we often get asked the question, is it better to take an overland route or risk flying on an airline with a poor safety record.  Of course, it depends on the specifics but it can come down to a calculated risk that on balance one is better than the other.
• Targeted locations – we are all familiar with the current targeting patterns in for example London, but consider repeated exposure to transport hubs, crowded spaces or remote/hostile environments. quite often we speak of wrong place, wrong time risk when travelling, but the more someone does it, the more their risk increases.
• Finally but potentially the most important of these multipliers is the effect of the unfamiliarity of a location on travellers and how this affects their behaviour, intentionally or not.  In terms of risk-seeking activity, e.g. those not being security-aware, not sticking to advice or guidelines.  Some people are made to travel in new environments, and some aren’t, I expect we all have our stories to tell, but they need to adopt a sensible approach when abroad. unforeseen consequences, perhaps of operating in a community in the wrong fashion, or not having the contextual knowledge of the risk to know how to operate safely and effectively all add up, and we have to get that across to people.

All of these give particular risks to deal with, and this is why we develop our travel systems to cope with them. In terms of trying to shape your risk management activity, you need to take into account three major factors that will determine exactly what that looks like:

Your environment, i.e. the landscape within which you will be operating, might contain a variety of risks all of which we can identify between us here today, as well as some that you may not yet know about, or have miscalculated in terms of how they might affect you.  in other words, getting a contextual understanding of where you want to operate is the first step.

Secondly, your activity, i.e. the nature of the business that you want to carry out which will soon be placed into that risk environment, who will be deployed, what they will be doing, and the outcomes of the expected activity will all factor your risks you are about to incur.

Finally, once you truly understand your environment, and your activity within it, you must define the risk appetite you will bear as a business, not as an individual to either accept, transfer or mitigate to a level that is acceptable to those carrying out that activity, and the key decision-makers within your company.

Case Study – Nepal Earthquake

The key points during this crisis were as follows

• This was an expected risk, but nonetheless, it caught a lot of people out due to its scale and severity.
• Interestingly mobile phone voice and SMS went down, but the data was still active and using Facebook messenger, we were able to communicate with people to establish comms and start to mobile some form of response.
• When that response came, it relied heavily on the international relief effort so it was a case of being swept along with that and making the best possible use of available resources. We needed to find out what was available and get that information to the teams, which we were able to do using Facebook.

The point I want to bring out here is communications – i.e. by having a communications cascade structure, to pass and receive information in times of crisis to a, work out who was in trouble, and b, be able to give them some accurate advice to allow them to make the correct decisions in terms of seeking help was what really worked here, so not necessarily the fact we were using Facebook, but we had a communication process to follow.

Case Study 2 – Kidnap in Nigeria

My second case study is a kidnapping that happened in November 2018, involving three client staff in West Africa, conducted by a criminal gang, wanting cash and being very proactive in terms of letting us and the client know what they wanted. We were very lucky in having a great team on the ground including the client staff, which is a key point:

• What was important here was a crisis management structure, which allowed people to think about the problem in a considered and correct fashion.
• We were able to set up very quickly both local and regional Crisis Management Team, the composition of which had been agreed in advance which again gave that separation that allowed the decision-makers space to breathe, and the local team clear direction on the ground.
• Finally, the use of local assets and knowledge of the environment and the culture of the gang resulted in a successful conclusion some 48 hours after the snatch, resulting in some battered and bruised but extremely relieved people getting home to their families.

Conclusions

The point here is the crisis management structure, not only the fact that we actually had one, but that it had been set up for some three years, exercised regularly and was well led and championed by senior management.  this advance investment was absolutely essential and there is no way we could have reacted and jumped into that cold and expected as good an outcome as we got.

so there we have it, two case studies, each with different points; travel tracking, communications and crisis management.

Listen to our Podcast

we have just launched our podcast series ‘ Whose Duty of Care is it Anyway?’ Listen to our first episode ‘ It’s all in the planning.’ Based on Dan on this article above.