Democratic Governance Programme

The Government of Malawi has been implementing a European Union-funded Democratic Governance Programme (DGP) since October 2011. The Malawi Police Service is one of the nine beneficiary institutions of the programme and has since implemented a number of activities under the programme. Two of the activities carried out under DGP are the training of CID officers in investigative interviewing skills and human rights and the training of public order management officers in human rights. The purpose of these two activities was to reduce the frequency and severity of abuses of force by police officers especially as they relates to investigation of crimes and policing of disorder. This comes against a background of a rise in the number of recorded deaths of suspects in police custody and the killing of 20 demonstrators by police officers on July 20^th and 21^st inn 2011.

The Malawi Police Service proposes to carry these two activities over into the year 2013-14 but before they can be implemented a need has been identified to evaluate the impact of the activities on the targeted officers’ observance of human rights. This evaluation will be conducted by my unit, the Research and Planning Unit, with assistance from an external consultant. I think my MSc in Police Leadership and Management will be handy for this purpose. Module four, which I am currently reading, is about ‘Policing and Crime Prevention’ and unit four of this module is about ‘Evaluating Crime Prevention’. Drawing on this unit, the evaluation will seek to examine whether abuses of force by police have diminished over the past two years. The evaluation study will also examine the extent to which changes in officers’ use of force can be attributed to the training that has been conducted as part of the programme. The study will also seek to pin down what it was about the training that led to the changes identified and how the problem was affected through the training. It will further examine whether there were other outcomes that resulted from the intervention.

This evaluation will inform the design and implementation of the trainings in 2013/14. This piece of writing will be instrumental in the preparation of the job advertisement to attract the right candidates for the consultancy. It will inform the terms of reference for the successful candidate.