When it comes to humanitarian protection, measuring outcomes has long felt like an elusive goal. Protection work is about safeguarding people’s rights, safety, and dignity in the face of crises and conflicts. But how do you measure the success of something as complex and intangible as “safety”? And what about dignity—how do we measure something so deeply personal in a world of constant uncertainty? These are the questions that those of us in the humanitarian protection field grapple with constantly.
Let’s start with a comparison. Measuring outcomes in other areas of humanitarian response often seems more straightforward. Take food security or shelter, for example: we can count the food baskets distributed, monitor nutrition rates, or track how many families have access to safe, dry places to sleep. Similarly, WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) interventions offer measurable data like the number of water points installed or a reduction in diarrheal diseases after hygiene campaigns. These results are tangible, visible, and usually (with some investment) measurable.
Now contrast that with protection. Can we measure the number of safety incidents prevented? What about incidents we don’t know about – the ones unreported because they happen in silence, to women, children, or marginalized groups? What about threats that shift and evolve? Even if we do have data on violence or killings, can we confidently attribute a reduction in incidents to a specific intervention? These are uncomfortable questions that don’t always have clear answers. Protection outcomes, shaped by countless external factors, are deeply contextual and subjective. They depend not just on what is done, but also on how people experience it.
Shifting Focus: Perceptions of Safety and Dignity
Amidst these challenges, a promising approach has emerged: measuring individuals’ feelings of safety and dignity. It may sound subjective, and it is—but therein lies its value. Feelings are deeply personal, yet they reflect realities that traditional metrics often miss. The quest to measure these perceptions highlights several key dimensions:
- Subjective Experiences Matter: Safety and dignity are not just physical realities; they are lived experiences. Measuring how people feel about their safety provides valuable insight into the outcomes of protection efforts.
- A Holistic Perspective: When people express their perceptions of safety and dignity, they speak to a range of factors: physical security, social stability, respect for their culture, and more. It’s about seeing safety as multi-dimensional, not one-size-fits-all.
- Context is Everything: Every community, every individual has unique protection concerns. A participatory approach that listens to people’s perceptions helps tailor interventions to the specific risks they face. It centers their realities, not external assumptions. By focusing on people’s lived experiences, interventions become more relevant and impactful. For example, understanding how a displaced community perceives safety can reveal hidden risks—perhaps women feel unsafe collecting outside the community, or youth fear harassment at checkpoints. When we listen to these realities, we gain a clearer sense of how interventions can tangibly improve people’s lives.
- Bridging Quantitative and Qualitative Methods: Perceptions may be subjective, but they can still be measured. Structured tools like surveys, interviews, and focus groups can capture these feelings systematically. With proper analysis, they offer actionable insights for improving protection work.
Measuring feelings of safety doesn’t aim to determine whether people are absolutely “safe.” That’s rarely realistic in crisis contexts where threats persist. Instead, it focuses on whether people feel safer than before—a subtle but powerful distinction that reflects the progress of an intervention, even if some risks remain.
The Challenges of Measuring Perceptions
Of course, this approach comes with its own limitations. Safety and dignity are complex, context-dependent concepts. How people define “safety” can vary across gender, cultures, social groups, or age brackets, to name a few factors. That’s why it’s essential to contextualize these terms during survey design, for example, by engaging focus groups from diverse segments of the population.
Then there’s the issue of external events. Perceptions of safety can shift overnight, beyond the control of any humanitarian intervention. Imagine an armed confrontation erupting near a community that had been feeling safer. Suddenly, the progress made through months of intervention feels fragile, overshadowed by new threats. This unpredictability highlights just how difficult it is to measure protection outcomes, where gains can be so easily disrupted by external events beyond the control of the humanitarian actor. These events can easily jeopardize the progress made, even if the intervention itself was effective.
And let’s not forget attribution. In protection work, outcomes are rarely the result of one intervention alone. A single actor cannot claim full credit for improving safety perceptions in a volatile environment. Instead, the focus should be on contribution: How has an intervention played a part in improving the overall situation?
A Step in the Right Direction: The PKOI
In response to these challenges, significant progress has been made. One standout example is the Protection Key Outcome Indicator (PKOI), developed by the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG ECHO). The PKOI is defined as:
“The percentage of individuals/target population in a given context reporting an improved feeling of safety (with dignity) by the end of the intervention compared to at the beginning.”
Launched in 2023 after years of piloting across over 130 projects, the PKOI provides a structured way to measure shifts in people’s perceptions of safety. By applying surveys and analyzing results disaggregated by gender, age, and disability, the PKOI brings much-needed rigor to a subjective concept. It bridges the gap between data and lived experience, helping humanitarian actors track progress and identify gaps in their protection efforts.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Measuring perceptions of safety and dignity is not a perfect science, nor should it be. The PKOI is a tool for learning, adapting, and improving. The humanitarian community must treat this as an ongoing process, one that evolves through feedback from the field and the voices of affected people.
The PKOI is an important step forward, but it’s not the final answer. To complement it, we need to explore additional methodologies, such as integrating real-time field feedback systems, participatory monitoring frameworks, or tools that capture more nuanced, community-specific data. Combining these approaches with the PKOI can help address gaps, improve adaptability, and ensure that interventions remain responsive to the evolving needs of affected populations. Measuring protection results must remain flexible, capable of adapting to new challenges, new crises, and new insights. As practitioners, we should continue asking ourselves: What are we missing? How can we do better? By staying open to innovation and grounded in the perspectives of the people we serve, we can continue refining how we measure protection outcomes—and, ultimately, how we ensure that people are safer, in every sense of the word.
Postscript: I had the privilege of leading the compilation of results, challenges, and lessons learned during the PKOI pilot phase. One key insight that stood out was just how deeply perceptions of safety are shaped by context—what feels like progress in one community might look entirely different in another. For instance, women in one area described a noticeable increase in safety simply because they could move more freely during the day, while in another, the same perception of safety only came after addressing fears of nighttime harassment. These nuances reinforced how critical it is to listen closely to what safety means for the people we aim to support.
After that I also contributed to developing the Guidance Tool for its application—a rewarding experience that underscored both the challenges and the possibilities of measuring protection outcomes. For anyone curious, you can explore the Guidance Tool for the PKOI [here].
I did both consultancies on behalf of the Inspire Consortium (hired by the IECAH [here].
