“Open Briefing should be an essential part of your organisation’s security strategy. From identifying critical gaps to implementing practical policies, Open Briefing should be your first call to assess and strengthen your security profile.”
Brad Brooks-Rubin, Managing Director, The Sentry

When travelling to or working in higher-risk countries, NGO staff face numerous safety, security and health threats. Understanding the threat environment is an essential part of fulfilling duty of care and keeping staff safe while on deployment.

Open Briefing produces bespoke travel threat briefings based on up-to-date intelligence from various open sources, NGO security forums, third-party risk advisories and our on-the-ground contacts. These comprehensive briefings cover:

• Political violence
• Civil unrest
• Kidnap
• Crime
• Environment
• Infrastructure
• Medical

We provide granularity from country-wide threat ratings to neighbourhood- or even street-level intelligence. We also include information on:

• Local laws and customs
• Consular and other emergency contacts
• Security advice

For more comprehensive context assessments, we conduct a full macro-environment analysis of the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental (PESTLE) factors that might impact positively or negatively on a new programme or office.

Our analysts take the time to understand the purpose of the mission or programme and assess the profiles of the staff involved and their employer. This allows us to better understand the internal vulnerabilities that will interact with the identified threats to create risk.

Our travel threat briefings and context assessments clearly detail the priority safety, security and health threats to the traveller. The client can use this as the starting point for a risk assessment using our free Security Risk Assessment Tool. Alternatively, our expert security risk management team can complete the risk assessment, and help you understand and mitigate the risks present in a particular environment.

Our team has recently completed travel threat briefings or context assessments for humanitarians and human rights defenders deploying to or based in:

• Central African Republic: Bangui, Bambari and Bria
• Mali: Bamako
• Nigeria: Abuja and Maiduguri
• Mozambique: Maputo, Beira and Pemba
• Yemen: Aden and Marib
• Afghanistan: Kabul
• Iraq: Baghdad and Erbil
• Jordan: Amman
• Ukraine: Kiev and Kramatorsk
• Russia: Moscow and St Petersburg

Please contact us to discuss your travel threat briefing and context assessment needs.