As of March 2010, the Swedish Police have a Swedish Police Adviser stationed in Nairobi. He is mandated to support the Police Reform Secretariat and the Police Reform Units in the Kenya National Police Service with strategic guidance for the management , coordination, implementation and monitoring of police reforms in Kenya. The Swedish Police are also providing short-term support to certain police reform areas, such as community policing and police training. A pilot project in community policing was launched in Kikuyu in September 2011 within this short-term support. The pilot will be rolled out to a few more areas during 2013. The support that the Swedish Police are providing to the Kenya National Police Service is financed by Sida. The current project period ends 31 December 2013 and the Swedish Police are now looking into the possibility to prolong the support between the Swedish Police and the Kenya National Police Service.
In April 2013 the Swedish police with support from ISSAT conducted a study to assess the preconditions for long-term bilateral development cooperation between the Swedish Police and the Kenya National Police Service and identified possible areas for cooperation. Some of the questions addressed in the study were:
- The will and the support for reform within different levels of the Kenya National Police Service
- The Police Service’s interest for reform cooperation with the Swedish Police and their capacity to undertake a development project/programme
The study included an analysis of the progress of the reform implementation process and an assessment of needs, relevance and feasibility for continued Swedish support to the reform process.
Sida has, based on the recommendations in the assessment, given the Swedish police a "go ahead" to start the process to formulate a project/programme proposal for a prolongation of the support. It is in the process of designing a programme proposal that the Swedish police requests support from ISSAT.The proposal should include clear and measurable objectives, indicators and expected results (on output, outcome and impact level) of the cooperation as well as an activity plan and a budget.
Mandating organisation / agency / department / ministry
Target organisation type(s)
Related activities
Mandate outputs / products
A locally anchored process conducted in order to develop a programme proposal for continued Swedish support to police reforms in Kenya
A clearly articulated programme proposal for continued Swedish support to police reforms in Kenya developed
Outcome objectives of mandate
Improved programme performance of the Swedish support to police reforms in Kenya
A broader SSR perspective off the Swedish support to police reforms in Kenya
Start date
10/09/2013End date
15/11/2013Summary
Specific Lessons Identified
Challenges
- Due to SIDA’s tight timelines, team suffered from challenging time constraints in the planning phase and while conducting the mission. This impacted local ownership of the process.
- National partners didn't have a clear idea of the mission objectives. Some believed that the team was there to support developing a community policing policy. This impacted negatively the process given the short time the team had in the field.
- The security situation in Kenya as a result of the Westgate incident complicated the planning process: timelines were pushed forward and the local partners were probably still too preoccupied with the repercussions of that incident.
- Workshop in Mombasa was too far from where the target group was located (Nairobi). This impacted level of participation. The objective of having it outside of the capital was to allow participants to focus on the workshop away from their daily work and also to facilitate the creation of a team as a result of the process. This could have been also achieved had the workshop been closer to the capital thus costing less in time and money.
Successes
- The team decided to send two members to the field in advance of the team’s deployment to start working on creating a “programme design team”. This worked very well. It was intended to be a structure representing local partners who would drive the process forward.
- It was a significant contribution to creating sustainability and supporting local ownership despite the very short timelines for the team in the field.
- Use of Dropbox as a tool to stock documents and share among team members was extremely useful.
Recommendations
- A bigger effort should have been invested in clarifying the mission’s objectives to local partners. Several actions could have helped in that direction:
- Having the “right capacity” on the ground to support HQ-based teams in passing through key messages to national stakeholders, creating clarity on mission’s objectives and contributing to supporting local ownership of the process.
- Team meetings were all conducted through tele-conference technologies. While this helped the planning process at a low cost, the challenge was when key messages had to be passed through: such as mission objectives, expectations from national partners, etc. Face-to-face meetings would have allowed inter-personal interactions to better consolidate a common understanding of key messages as opposed to tele-conferencing which works better when the team members have already worked together, are familiar with each others’ models and methods of work, etc. In this case the Swedish Police Adviser was new which should have been considered as a reason to have a face-to-face meeting, ensuring that everybody is on the same page.
- During team meetings, HQ-based team should have been clearer in their messages to field-based staff in terms the objectives to be communicated to national partners.
- More time spent on planning and more time in the field would have been useful to nurture a better nationally owned process through -for example- being able to do key visits after the workshop presenting the results and recommendations from the workshop.
Tags
Challenges
- The report from the previous assessment mission to Kenya should have been shared before the design mission deployed (as indicated in team ToRs). This would have better informed the process and better clarified the objective of the mission. This was not done because of SIDA’s bureaucracy measures and the person in charge being too busy with other issues. Also team is not certain that SIDA understood the importance of sending out the report on time.
- This design mission could have been better informed by the previous assessment mission had the assessment mission been focused on mapping out and analyzing the needs and challenges. Due to the political process at that time, the assessment was anchored around finding out if Sweden should continue its engagement in Kenya without going into the details of such an engagement. In reality, the team had suggested sending out a scoping mission in between the assessment and design missions to identify the main challenges that would then inform the design process. This suggestion was not adopted by SIDA. As a result the already limited time dedicated to the design process had to include an assessment of challenges.
- Some team members would have appreciated a proper methodological framework for this mandate similar to the evaluation methodology.
- The time SIDA is taking to approve the programme document goes beyond the overall timing given to the team to have the document ready for implementation.
- One of the criticisms SIDA has formulated concerning the design document is about its local ownership when in reality the lack of local ownership is a result of the limited timing SIDA allowed for this process.
Successes
- The workshop was a big success. Participants were engaged throughout the whole period and gave their very best efforts to complete the document despite of limited timing. However, participants were mostly people who were already on board in terms of understanding community policing concept and its application in Kenya. Participation from police officials would have been a better indicator of their buy-in into the process.
Recommendations
- ISSAT is working on Programme Design methodology
Tags
Challenges
- Absence of ISSAT OGN (methodological guidance) on programme design was a challenge.
Tags
Challenges
- Buy-in from Kenyan police officials was very limited.
- Team didn't have the time to anchor the process before deployment. Team also lacked time to discuss the results of the workshop with relevant stakeholders.(see more under planning and logistics category).
Successes
- Team managed to put together a “programme design committee” before the workshop (see more under planning and logistics category). They contributed to the programme document and did a huge effort in driving the process forward.
Recommendations
- Team should have planned after action meetings with the police leadership.
Tags
Successes
- Team collaboration was extremely positive including with the Programme Design Team who were very much dedicated to the task at hand.
- Team had some meetings with relevant partners such as the Usalama Forum which was a great meeting providing a lot of insight and information.
Recommendations
- Team should have planned more time to meet with other international and local actors for coordination.
Tags
Challenges
- Workshop participants were not clear about how to approach this.
- Team was committed to looking at gender aspects but was not successful in reflecting that in the design document.
- Team would have appreciated technical gender expertise to feed into the design process for example through SIDA’s gender desk in Kenya.
- Targets within the programme document lacked gender disaggregation.
Successes
- ISSAT supported the team to review the draft programme document from a gender perspective.
- The assessment process did have a gender expert on board which enabled team to produce an assessment report which reflected gender issues. Those then were used for the design document.
Recommendations
- Team should have had more in-depth discussions about gender and policing in Kenya with SIDA and other international and national stakeholders.
- Team should have tapped into gender specific expertise throughout the design process.
