Democratic Governance
Regional Projects
Strengthening evidence-based public policies, and enhancing regional coordination and collaboration to implement effective citizen security strategies in Central America.
The Infosegura Regional Project is executed by the United Nations Development Programme Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean (RBLAC-UNDP), in partnership with seven UNDP country offices (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica, and The Dominican Republic).
Infosegura provides technical and strategic support for managing information regarding citizen security, from a multidimensional approach, to inform the development of evidence-based public policies.
InfoSegura came into being in 2014 with the financial support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In addition, strategic partnerships have been sought with the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund, the Spotlight Initiative to prevent gender-based violence, with the Offices of the United Nations resident coordinators, with agencies such as IOM, UNWOMEN, UNFPA, UNOPS, ACNUR and others.
In this line of work, InfoSegura has contributed to the creation of resources for national policy making, and cooperation frameworks for development and their revisions in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, as well as undertaking analysis of local and national policy impact, from the standpoint of governance, prevention, resilience, gender and effective governance, by way of its knowledge and skills strategy.
SIGOB
Strengthening management capacities for governance. The objective is for the program to develop the methods and tools to support public policy implementation with governmental action, and bridge the gap between decision and action.
The Governance Management Project, which operates under the UNDP Regional Directorate for Latin America and the Caribbean, is designed to strengthen the capacities of institutional management for democratic governance. The tools developed as part of this project can be seen operating in management systems known throughout the region as SIGOB.
The Objective of SIGOB is to develop methodologies and tools that support political action by the government’s senior management and contribute to producing and maintaining the conditions necessary for democratic governance. These tools are aimed at reducing the gap between the decisions made by the initiators of governmental political action and the capacity of the Executive to carry out such decisions.
The characteristics of SIGOB are as follows:
- It facilitates external transparency (as seen by citizens) as well as internal transparency (as seen by government actors);
- It contributes to the effectiveness of policies, with indicators for early alerts and operational solutions to obstacles, and to the execution of these policies;
- It encourages high levels of interaction with citizens through access to information, the reception and systematization of public opinion, and the integration of these opinions into the co-management of policies;
- It makes use of methods and media available for planning and strategic management with the aim of overcoming many of the challenges of human development not only in the medium and long term but also through short term actions, which shows management's adaptability in finding the time to manage conflicts without endangering governability;
- It contributes to adjusting government policy actions to the law.
- To make these characteristics more tangible in each SIGOB module, approaches are systematically integrated for guiding the formulation of policies, managing these policies, envisioning products that are interchangeable among the various participants, guiding methods of analysis, and offering software that supports processes and products while promoting interactive communication and techniques for organizational implementation learned over the course of 15 years of project operations.
CariSECURE
Promoting the resilience of valid, credible, and comparable information on citizen security to improve policy decision-making, and reduce crime and violence in ten countries in the eastern and southern Caribbean.
CariSECURE draws on a public health approach to crime prevention. In adopting this approah, the Project workS with technical personnel in public institutions to standardize and disaggregate citizen security data across the region, and build the analytical capacity of public institutions to use such data to identify and measure youth crime and violence trends and resilience factors, draw conclusions on the actual state of citizen security in each country, and identify possible interventions. Finally, the Project promote a culture of evidence-based policy-making and program development in national institutions, which focuses on addressing the root causes of youth involvement in violence and crime.
CariSECURE is one of three components of the broader USAID Youth Empowerment Services (YES) project which seeks to reduce youth involvement in violence and crime in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean. In collaboration with the governments of 10 Eastern and Southern Caribbean countries and other UN, regional and sub-regional agencies, CariSECURE will strengthen the capacity of regional and national institutions to collect, analyze and use citizen security data to develop evidence-based policies and programs that effectively target risk factors which drive youth violence, crime and victimization. Project activities will be implemented in Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, the Republic of Guyana, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Republic of Suriname, and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.