Training the Trainers: The Community Score Card takes another step forward

Published January 2022

Nepal Police and International Alert have trained 100 officers as the first police trainers in the Community Score Card (CSC) approach developed to improve collaboration and mutual accountability between service providers and the community.

A groupe of police officers taking part of a Training of Trainers session — Participants of Community Score Card training in Butwal, Lumbhini Province. © Nepal Police

The officers, from Province Two and Lumbhini Province, took part in the Training of Trainers (ToT) programme last month, following on from the launch of the CSC training manual at Nepal Police headquarters. The CSC approach has been developed jointly by International Alert Nepal and Nepal Police, with funding from UKAID, as part of the Strengthening Access to Holistic, Gender Responsive and Accountable Justice (SAHAJ) project.

‘’The trained police officers will serve as trainers in upcoming training on CSC. This will help to sustain and institutionalise this approach within Nepal police,’’ says International Alert Nepal Director Rabina Shrestha.

The ToT programme has been designed in close coordination with the Research, Planning, and Development Directorate (R&PD) of Nepal Police. The curriculum was finalised by the International Alert training team, the senior police officer of R&PD and the Security and Justice (S&J) Advisor (Retired Additional Inspector General of Nepal Police) after considering its aims and objective and the participants’ level of understanding.

Participants of the Training of Trainers programme pose for the camera. — The Community Score Card trainers of training first batch Lumbhini Province joined by Rtd. AIG Thule Rai, Inspector Prashant Shrestha, v, Security and Justice Associate UNOPS Gajendra Rai, Alert Nepal Director Rabina Shrestha, Alert Lead Trainer and Manager Niresh Chapagain. © Nepal Police

Feedback from participants shows that 80% of the group found the CSC tool to be very relevant to strengthening the community-police partnership at the local level. Participants reported the training was very useful and relevant to them (74%) and the facilitator was very good (71%). The overall response from the participants towards the training was very good (65%) and the majority (78%) said that their expectations have been fulfilled. Likewise, more than one-third (35%) said that the logistics were very good and that their expectations were met.

At the end of the training, all participants developed a project for field practice related to different themes such as gender-based violence prevention and response; reduction of road traffic accidents; prevention and reduction of drug abuse; prevention of child marriage and suicide prevention.

One participant described how the training helped him to facilitate a scorecard session with the community to improve security and justice services and citizen and state relations.

The community scorecard training helped me to identify causes and consequences of security and justice challenges and evaluate our service performance from service seekers perspective.
Sub-Inspector Krishan Khadka (training participant).

Alert Nepal has found that using the CSC as a planning, and evaluation tool to evaluate the service delivery status of Nepal Police helps Nepal Police to strengthen trust and collaboration with the community.

The CSC tool is a systematic process of non-confrontational dialogues that gradually improves collaboration and mutual accountability between the community and police. It guides the development of joint indicator settings for good performance, accountability standards and a common scoring process. The collaboration fosters stronger ownership of the processes and generates a greater sense of responsibility between community and police towards each other and the mutually beneficial goal of better community security and justice.

Our rapid survey shows that after a CSC facilitated by a trained police officer in the community, people are keen to support police and are more confident to register cases at the Police Office whereas the same people before the CSC session were more distant from the police.
Lead trainer and Alert Nepal programme manager Niresh Chapagain.

The Alert Nepal team is confident that the Community Score Card good practices can be sustained if it’s institutionalised within the system and is continuously working with Nepal police and local government institutions and sharing the learnings across like-minded organisations, donors, and the government.

About the project

The Strengthening Access to Holistic, Gender Responsive and Accountable Justice (SAHAJ) project addresses a key challenge to gender-based violence (GBV) prevention and reduction – the limited understanding of the harmful effects of social norms and practices.

The SAHAJ project aims to tackle the root causes of GBV and improve the capacity of the security and justice system to provide protection and services to the most at-risk women and girls in Nepal, through family-centred, school-centred, and grassroots-based accountability approaches.

The project has designed a strong operational research component to provide lessons and evidence on what works in changing harmful social norms.