Contributing Evidence to Programming: Armed Violence Monitoring Systems

Armed violence monitoring systems (AVMS) are an effective way to ensure that resources for development programmes and humanitarian interventions—specifically in relation to the prevention and reduction of armed violence—are used effectively and to support interventions with a proven record of success.

In the past few decades, AVMS have become an important tool to better understand the scale and distribution of armed violence. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) currently supports AVMS in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Caribbean, Colombia, Croatia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Kenya, Somalia, South-eastern and Eastern Europe, and Sudan. UNDP has observed that national governments are increasingly requesting support for AVMS.

Contributing Evidence to Programming: Armed Violence Monitoring Systems is a new Working Paper from the Geneva Declaration, commissioned by the UNDP, which clarifies the concept of AVMS and offers a deeper understanding of how they work. Designed to inform policy-makers and practitioners working on violence reduction and prevention, the report will assist experts in developing indicators that capture the scale and scope of armed violence at a local, national, or global level.

This Working Paper presents the results of a survey conducted across a sample of 20 AVMS. The survey highlights that AVMS is a generic term for a range of different monitoring systems, variously labelled as crime or violence observatories, an injury surveillance systems, or early warning systems.

The survey highlights the fact that AVMS commonly collect data from a wide range of sources, although these always include some official statistics. The standard of data collection therefore partly reflects governments’ willingness and ability to collect and provide accurate figures Governments thus play a central role; not only in providing data, but also in funding AVMS. At the multilateral level, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNDP have been indispensible to the establishment of AVMS.

The Working Paper includes a comparative analysis of five AVMS in Colombia, Jamaica, South Africa, Sudan, and the United Kingdom, and highlights the challenges inherent in ongoing data collection in a conflict-affected setting, and suggests ways to overcome these challenges.

Contributing Evidence to Programming has been released to coincide with the World Health Organisation’s 5th Milestones in a Global Campaign for Violence Prevention Meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, on 6-7 September 2011.

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