UN
UN-backed Afghan community police teach schoolchildren about safety measures
BAMYAN - Two schools in the Yakawlang district of Afghanistan’s central Bamyan province have spent the past two weeks serving as the pilot sites for a United-Nations backed community policing project – locally known as Police e-Mardumi – aimed at improving public safety.
“The project is useful and improves the safety of the community,” said Yakawlang’s Education Department Head, Sayed Jawhar Amal, last week, when visited by a team from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the implementing partner ‘Sayara’ and the Bamyan provincial head of Police e-Mardumi, Colonel Imami.
The first schools to be reached by Bamyan’s community police for lectures on safety were the Nayak Boys School, and the co-educational Sherh e-Qalendar School. The safety outreach training and school outreach activities fall within the UN-supported Afghanistan Democratic Policing Project, a wider scheme to enhance police accountability and responsiveness to their communities.
Funded by the Government of the Netherlands, the project is managed by the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and its implementation is overseen by UNAMA.
“The purpose of the project is to increase the capacity and motivation of the police to serve the people, and to demonstrate to the Afghan people that the police can provide valuable service to communities, building their trust and confidence in the police,” said A. Heather Coyne of UNAMA’s Police Advisory Unit (PAU).
“UNAMA conducts monitoring and evaluation of the Netherlands project to assess impact and to distill best practices, allowing the donor community to strengthen its engagement on community policing,” the UN Police Advisor added.
The safety outreach component covers 15 districts in seven provinces, with Police e-Mardumi teams reaching out to three schools or community groups per district. Sayara, the implementation partner, trains the police in conducting safety briefings in schools and in other community venues, including mosques.
Besides Bamyan, other Afghan provinces which will be reached by this outreach campaign in the coming weeks are Balkh, Baghlan, Ghor, Helmand, Kunduz and Uruzgan.
The school outreach campaign was also launched in the western province of Ghor last week, covering over seven schools and hundreds of students, according to the head of community policing in the province, Captain Mohammad Maskinyar. The campaign there will last until the end of next month.
A police spokesperson for the north-eastern Kunduz province, where the campaign started last week, said targeting schoolchildren is the “best choice” for Police e-Mardumi public outreach activities.
“We can channel the messages through the children to the families and to the community,” said the spokesperson, Sayed Sarwar Hussaini.
“I wish one a day we could really be trusted community police and our police reintegrate with the people without having weapons and military equipment,” he added.
The school safety campaign in Bamyan’s western district was conducted over a two-week period last month with Police e-Mardumi members visiting the two schools to brief the students on first aid and what to do in case of emergencies such as fires, traffic accidents, floods, earthquakes, as well as mine awareness, while also discussing their role in keeping the schoolchildren and the wider community safe.
During the Bamyan visit, Colonel Imami and the visiting representatives from the project partners conducted an inspection of the programme’s impact at the two schools, explaining to the students that visiting schools is part of police efforts towards building the community’s trust and confidence in the community police force, which is under the remit of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior (MoI).
The visitors capped their field trip by distributing school bags, lunch boxes and pencil cases to 390 students, as well as medical packs and flashlights to teachers for school use. These supplies were provided by the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan (EUPOL)’s Police e-Mardumi support programme.
The secretariat of the Police e-Mardumi was officially inaugurated in April 2012 at the MoI’s offices in the capital, Kabul, with support from the UN Development Programme (UNDP). The initiative encourages community-oriented policing and joint problem solving within MoI’s mandate of improving the delivery of the most critical public services of the government.
“Evidence from the independent annual 2011 Police Perception Survey commissioned by UNDP last year demonstrated that 66 per cent of Afghans believe that regular public meetings with the police will help improve security in their community, and that where such meetings had actually been held, 80 per cent of Afghans reported that these had improved local security,” notes UNDP Afghanistan on its website.
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