Peacebuilding, Governance, Gender and Protection Assessments - A Basic Guide for Busy Practitioners

This guide is designed to help Catholic Relief Services (CRS) staff and other organisations to understand and assess peace building, governance, gender, and protection issues in the countries they are working in. The guide allows organisations to gain the necessary information to inform project planning and design, and to ensure effective, holistic, and integrated projects.  As explained in the guide, gender assessments are a near-universal donor requirement, and with some major donors, similar assessments must now also be carried out to ensure conflict sensitivity and the integration of good governance and social accountability into multi-sectorial development programmes. 

The guide offers a list of questions and a glossary of terms for each focus area, wihch are meant to provide basic, “good enough” guidelines for assessing conflict dynamics, governance patterns, gender relations, and protection issues. In practice, the depth with which each component is treated will vary with the scope and complexity of specific projects and donor requirements. For a given proposal to be responsive, it may also be necessary to go beyond the basic assessment instrument provided in this “good enough” guidance.

This is the second version of the guide to which the publishers have added a protection assessment in addition to the conflict, governance, and gender assessment tools. As stated in the guide, “While not yet considered a component of the core competency, protection is an important cross-cutting consideration for both humanitarian and development programming. Our focus is primarily on the protection of children and adults at risk of exploitation and abuse, and to a lesser degree on refugees and internally displaced persons in violent conflict settings.”