Organisations have a legal and moral duty of care to take all reasonable steps to ensure that their staff are safe from harm or injury. However, human rights defenders, humanitarian aid workers, journalists, peacebuilders and others are working in increasingly violent contexts and within increasingly restricted civic spaces. The key to keeping staff and partners safe in such circumstances is effective security risk management.

The process is not complicated, but it can be daunting for those organisations and managers new to the approach. As part of our commitment to spreading good security practice throughout the human rights and humanitarian communities, Open Briefing has today launched the Security Risk Assessment Tool (SRAT).

The Security Risk Assessment Tool from Open Briefing is an essential free resource for both experienced NGO security managers and those new to security risk assessments.

Open Briefing developed the tool for its own security risk management consultants to use; however, it has proved so useful, that we are making it freely available to the wider NGO community!

Key features of the tool include:

• Instructions and tooltips to guide you through the process.
• Questions to help you set your organisation’s risk threshold.
• Automatically calculates risk ratings and other parameters.
• Helps you chose your risk strategy for each threat.
• Clearly shows which risks are acceptable and which need further mitigation.
• Automatically generates risk matrices for both inherent and residual risk.
• Generates pre-formatted reports for you to print or save as PDFs.

You can download SRAT for free today.

If you need help using the tool, you may benefit from one of our free NGO security risk management workshops. We have also released our Personal Security Profile and crisis log templates today.