Reducing risk factors produces community resilience and strength. It also empowers communities to take a more active role in promoting their safety and security, including framing their prevention ideas into long term development goals. This project will thus support the development of community initiatives by building core capacities and responsive culture for crime and violence prevention at national, county and community level.
To achieve this, the project includes the following activities:

• Safety Audits
• Community Safety Planning
• Crime Observatory

Developing effective community safety strategy requires research. This is a critical area that cannot be bypassed. The reasons why a community safety audit is conducted: because resources are limited an audit can help identify the most serious problems to ensure time, effort and money is not wasted; because different stakeholders in community may want to focus on different problems an audit can help resolve these conflicts by providing factual information on which problems are most serious. Hence, Usalama will organize safety audits in each of its communities, which will inform what type of crime and violence prevention initiatives are needed most. The efforts of different organizations will also be coordinated to avoid duplication and to make the best use of available resources.

Community crime and violence prevention models should be based on simple local solutions for local problems. Recognizing that community ownership is essential to this process, Usalama will support the establishment of community initiatives through a complementary approach, i.e. working to build and safeguard core local systems, including various stakeholders. The key to such models is planning. Usalama is working with community members to find out what the main problems are, develop interventions that address specific issues and evaluate what is working.  A safety strategy shapes selected group priority problems into focus or thematic areas. Each focus area will have a team that will assist in reducing the problem by initiating suitable intervention programmes. The planning involves coming up with clear goals and objectives, resource mobilization and project management. The community safety strategy will be monitored and evaluated.

In general, a crime observatory is the public observation, collection and analysis of crimes data. The objectives of an observatory are to comprehend the complexity of criminal trends and to provide a general overview of these trends, as well as predict their evolution. The detailed information like the profiles of victims and offenders, the location and the way crimes or violence are committed, will be used for developing a long term community crime prevention strategy and initiatives. Communities, therefore, are involved in the collection and analysis of crime data, which is entered into a digital system, and with this information help the police to make evidence based decisions to respond more efficiently