Spaces for Change | S4C has just kicked off its new people-centred public safety initiative, tagged Security and Rights Opportunity (SRO) Project, supported by Open Society Foundations. The SRO project will be implemented in Benue and Bayelsa States, integrating community policing models with approaches that enhance community information and awareness, and responds to vulnerabilities related to public space, gender, youth, and substance abuse—while also strengthening families and resilience—to enable truly systemic collective actions.
To kick off the project, Spaces for Change | S4C and its local partner, Communities Alliance against Displacement (CAD) visited Benue and Bayelsa between August and September respectively, meeting with traditional institutions, community groups, women and youth associations, local farmers, state government departments and a very wide range of local stakeholders. These meetings afforded an opportunity to engage with various communities across the two states in order to understand the various issues that have plagued the state and how communities are building resilience to them. These visits also helped the implementing teams to understand the cultural, historical and contextual underpinnings of public safety and work together with the communities to co-design initiatives that would strengthen community resilience and ensure sustainable peace in the abodes.
The community public safety initiative aims at protecting traditional livelihoods and social cohesion initiatives that give residents a stake in their community’s safety and development. In Benue State, the team visited seven (7) local governments where young leaders noted that public safety, access to safe water, healthcare and basic farm inputs are some of the key needs of communities and the local people who live there. In Bayelsa, S4C found that the majority of the safety breaches in communities are as a result of poverty, unemployment, drug abuse, idleness, illiteracy and cultism. The activities of cult groups have resulted in numerous deaths, involuntary displacement, reprisal attacks and violent clashes between cultists and security agencies.
Despite these setbacks, it was observed that communities have cultural ways of responding to internal shocks and stresses. A return to these cultural approaches will not only restore rapidly-disappearing cultural values and practices, but also deter local youth from engaging in societal vices. S4C will leverage its network-member organizations within the Action Group on Free Civic Space (AGFCS) to deliver empowerment clinics that will strengthen the agency of target communities on public safety preparedness, civic rights protection and legal redress mechanisms.
Overall, the public safety project aims at providing local solutions to local issues. As communities continue to build their resilience to ensure their safety in the face of recurring threats, homegrown solutions peculiar to local realities are crucial in ushering sustainable peace. Together with local partners and coalition outfits like the AGFCS, S4C’s activities under this project will continue to explore these localized solutions in building the resilience of target communities.
