Project Description
Democracy International provided analytical service support related to citizen security, youth crime, and violence prevention to the Office of Regional Sustainable Development in USAID’s Latin America and Caribbean Bureau (LAC/RSD). DI has organized learning exchanges for practitioners, researchers, and U.S. government officials to find new ways to interrupt cycles of violence, combat gang influence, and produce new ideas for community-level crime prevention strategies. These collaborative learning activities have included a major November 2014 conference in Antigua, Guatemala that joined leaders from the public, private, and NGO sectors from the United States and Central and South America on issues of citizen security in the Americas and a January 2013 workshop that brought together USAID officers from Latin America and the Caribbean as well as leading citizen security experts to share best practices in regional crime prevention.
In 2014 and 2015 DI supported a series of joint USAID-INL workshops held in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador designed to enhance and promote coordination for implementation of the place-based strategy for homicide prevention. In June 2015 DI conducted a security and justice sector assessment in Honduras. The results of this assessment will inform USAID’s strategy and programming in Honduras over the next five years. In July 2015 DI supported a conference with the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety in Rio de Janeiro. In 2016 DI completed a study on best practices in community violence prevention in conjunction with researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School. The study included field research on prevention programming in the United States as well as Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.