Case Study: Analyzing Stakeholder Relations for Security Sector Reform

Background

In 2018, we worked with an international consultancy aiming to enhance security sector performance in a fragile country in East Africa. The project’s implementation faced different challenges, most notably:

• There was a lack of a clear governance architecture to promote shared institutional ownership between multiple security sector stakeholders.
• There was an uneven contribution at the operational level, with residual unwillingness or inability to share intelligence between assets.

All these issues were heightened by a high turnover in roles due to the political situation in the country - which meant that relationships built over months could be discarded overnight, changing the key players for strategic engagement and forcing the team to gain a better view of the situation as it evolved in real-time.

Stakeholder Management on AKTEK iO

Solution

The organization needed to understand the stakeholders involved, their relations, and which areas they controlled. With such intricate networks, visualizations can help simplify the view for all involved.

We, therefore, provided them with the stakeholder mapping capabilities of AKTEK iO, so they could more easily map power dynamics, which allowed them to understand the tensions and avoid flaring them as they implemented the reform project.

With AKTEK iO, they visualized relationships between different stakeholders and quantifiable attributes like power, engagement, level of openness to a conversation, etc. They mapped on Action-Perception matrices to develop better-informed and conflict-sensitive engagement plans.

Using AKTEK iO's mobile app, they could also keep the information updated in nearly real-time, changing data on their stakeholders after each meeting and sharing it with the members of their organization that needed to access it.

Impact & results

• With AKTEK iO, our client improved their stakeholder mapping and overall management, which allowed them to deploy conflict-sensitive programming and implement new security reform initiatives in a context-sensitive way.
• The client kept all the information updated and accurate using our mobile app.
• With AKTEK iO's data encryption and granular permissions capabilities, the client managed all stakeholder information safely without worrying about information leaks, whether intentional or accidental.