Aid Worker Security Report 2023 - Security Training in the Humanitarian Sector: Issues of equity and effectiveness

This year’s Aid Worker Security Report discusses the trend of localised security risk reflected in the latest verified data, and examines an area of security risk management that exemplifies the disparities in the sector: security training. 

Training for aid workers operating in high-risk environments, particularly the in-person, experiential courses that simulate incident scenarios and those that teach critical first aid skills, are costly. Despite a dearth of hard evidence proving their effectiveness, the consensus among humanitarian security professionals seems to be that these courses, if well-designed and context-specific, are worth the investment. After a presentation of the latest aid worker security statistics, this report will delve into the questions and ethical implications around security training: who gets it, what should it consist of, and how do we know it works?