Harmattan Risk helps international NGOs and their local partners to build intelligence and planning capacity to support performance and organisational resilience in complex contexts.
As a prelude to service descriptions, NGO readers can note that we understand that NGOs have unique budget constraints. We tailor our NGO fees accordingly. In addition, we have worked with NGOs on a pro bono basis in the past when there was a strong mutual learning opportunity, and we would be happy to discuss pro bono options (in our case, pro bono means no fees, with the client covering only agreed, direct costs).
Harmattan’s services for NGOs are listed below. The linked text takes you to a description of the given service further down this page.
Capacity-building / training
Local NGO organisational health and integrity in complex environments
Sustaining project effectiveness in complex operating environments
Training in specific socio-political assessment and planning approaches
Discussion workshops for strategic clarity and options
Advisory engagements
Capacity-building
Harmattan provides training to hone and instil the skills and knowhow that NGOs need in complex political environments and contexts. Tailored courses are adjusted according to context and learning needs, but the following are our baseline NGO courses.
Local NGO organisational health and integrity in complex environments
(3 days as a baseline, 4 days to better ensure that at least some participants are capable not just of applying the learning themselves, but also of teaching the core material in their own organisations; in-person)
The premise of this course is threefold. First, international NGOs aspire to greater localisation in the interests of access, local ownership and sustainable impact. Thus, they increasingly depend on local partners for service delivery. Second, local partners can come under intense pressure and face considerable hazard simply by being based in a challenging environment, and pressures can actually intensify because of their relationship with a foreign NGO. If they are not proficient in managing socio-political risk, they can become weak and distracted, and hence ineffectual. Finally, while a last ditch option for an international NGO is to leave a country, local NGOs by and large need to remain there however much the context deteriorates. Socio-political risk management can therefore be a matter of organisational survival.
Our course for local NGOs speaks to the above premises by building local NGOs’ capacity to manage socio-political risk to their own organisations.
The course guides participants through a thought process aimed at understanding how their NGO could be affected by national and local political dynamics and changes in the wider environment. More importantly, it guides an exploration of the organisation’s relationship with different socio-political stakeholders whose attitudes and behaviour could directly impinge on the NGO’s integrity, security and performance.
Participants learn how to derive priority issues and challenges, and to plan to mitigate them. A crucial aspect of planning is a stakeholder engagement strategy that seeks to sustain socio-political support while creating relational buffers between the NGO and potentially hostile or predatory interests.
Security is an element of the course, with emphasis on threat assessment and stakeholder-centric security planning, in other words sustaining legitimate and supportive relationships which can help to deter and respond to illegitimate encroachments on the NGO or direct threats to NGO personnel.
The course encourages discussion about some of the hard realities and trade offs that NGOs in fractious environments need to contend with. This includes the fact that a local NGO’s relationship with foreign donors and NGOs can actually be a risk factor, in some cases increasing government suspicion or associating an NGO with foreign values and interests.
The course can be for one NGO, and in this instance the NGO itself is the object of the exercise. Team exercises then actually result in a top-level assessment and plan which can be built up into actionable self-guidance.
If the course includes several local NGOs, one or more participants could volunteer their organisations to be the “customers” and objects of team exercises, or, when political sensitivities inhibit openly sharing about one’s organisation, a hypothetical case can be used.
By the end of the course, participants will have a workable knowledge of and proficiency in relevant concepts, and will be able to guide the socio-political risk management exercise within their organisations (if at least some participants seek to learn how to teach the core thought processes in their own organisations, then an additional day is recommended).
In some cases, in the interests of sustained impact it might be valuable for Harmattan’s instructor to remain on site for a period of follow-up work with the NGO to hone relevant skills and to help clarify the organisational fit of the taught thought process (who, when, linked to what other processes…).
Sustaining project effectiveness in complex operating environments
(3 days as a baseline, in-person)
The object of the exercise is an NGO’s project on the ground in a fragile or volatile context. The course provides perspectives, tools and approaches to make sense of the project’s fit within a complex socio-political landscape, identify potential issues that could impede project progress or constrain access, and formulate plans to manage priority issues. The intelligence element of the course brings together environment, stakeholder and scenario analysis for a holistic perspective on near and longer-term challenges. That feeds into planning, which integrates ongoing risk management and contingency preparedness, stakeholder engagement and proactive adaptation.
There are two general variants of the course.
One is for a specific NGO or NGO partnership (e.g. an international NGO and its local partners). In this case, the emphasis would be a step-by-step process to understand and plan for project-level socio-political risk. A strong element of the course is practical team exercises using an NGO project case. The case can be a live project, in which instance results can be directly applied in short order. It could also be a past project which the NGO found to be particularly challenging, and hence which provides considerable grist for learning.
The other variant is for a group of NGOs, for example members of an NGO association or consortium. In this case, since a joint course represents an excellent opportunity for practical cross-learning, the course would be balanced between the above process, and interactive discussion aimed at sharing experiences and lessons learned when operating in challenging environments. Discussion occurs within selected themes, for example the challenge of working within divided communities, or dealing with local government distrust, and is guided by thought provoking questions.
Training in specific socio-political assessment and planning approaches
(1 to 2 days per approach, in-person but online is an option for 1-day variants)
Within both the project and local NGO courses, several different approaches are applied in the wider thought process, and some of these can be extracted to form short, discrete courses on a specific methodology. These include, for example:
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Socio-political environment assessment and risk management planning
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Scenario analysis and strategic contingency planning
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Stakeholder analysis and engagement planning
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Threat assessment and security planning – this would include a focused stakeholder analysis to inform an acceptance strategy and a relationship-based security approach
Discussion workshops for strategic clarity and options
(1 to 2 days, in-person)
Workshops are an opportunity for one or a group of NGOs to articulate uncertainties, clarify their significance, and share ideas and lessons about how to address them. Themes would be selected in preparatory discussions, and can be formulated for different geographic and operational levels. That said, workshops, as opposed to courses, are best suited for discussing particularly ambiguous dynamics and concerns for which there are currently no established playbooks and that still require clear problem definition. A few examples of relevant types of topics could be:
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A fragmenting global world order and implications for NGO relevance, legitimacy and sustainability
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Illiberalism and nationalist populism in NGOs’ HQ regions
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The effects of great power competition on conflict and humanitarian needs in the Global South
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The clampdown on civil society space – drivers and directions
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Is neutrality possible in an age of polarisation?
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Future-proofing NGOs in a volatile global context
Workshops result in a clear articulation and understanding of a problematic dynamic or trend, its actual and potential implications, and an initial sense of what to do about it. In some cases it might be useful to include third-party experts on a given dynamic. However, for the most part, between the discussion facilitator and NGO personnel in the room there is usually sufficient knowledge for a sense-making exercise.
Advisory engagements
In other locations of this website are two types of consulting exercises which would be applicable to NGOs. They are fully described in their own locations. Here we briefly summarise their relevance in an NGO context, and links are provided to the full engagement description.
Operational reviews (click here for a full description)
In an NGO context, the object of the exercise would be a specific NGO project or country presence. The review’s emphasis on actor and stakeholder perceptions is particularly instructive in an NGO context, since it provides not just intelligence on the NGO’s fit within its environment, but also insights that can be used to adjust a local acceptance strategy.
Intelligence practice reviews (click here for a full description)
Relevant to NGOs would be the processes, functions and resources which an NGO uses to assess potential challenges to the global organisation, plan for specific projects and deployments, and safeguard people and reputation. In Harmattan’s experience, there is usually considerable research and analysis capacity in experienced NGOs, but often a missed opportunity to turn this capacity onto the organisation itself to better plan for its own resilience in the context of political pressure and change.
The above should only be seen as reference points. In practice, advisory engagements are often shaped according to unique needs and contexts.