SAFE Basic Training Curriculum

"SAFE's integrated safety trainings help media practitioners and social communicators better navigate turbulent situations in order to provide alternative, independent media to their communities and the world."

Developed as part of the SAFE (Securing Access to Free Expression) Initiative, the SAFE Basic Training Curriculum seeks to provide media practitioners, social communicators, civil society organisations, and non-governmental organisations with the basic skills and knowledge needed to continue operating safely in closing spaces around the world.

The SAFE Initiative is IREX's flagship effort to enable media practitioners and social communicators to work as safely as possible in closed and closing spaces. The project serves to equip media practitioners and social communicators with the means to resiliently continue their important work and manage - as well as mitigate - the risks and threats they face in their day-to-day work uncovering injustices, reporting on corruption, and holding authorities accountable. The initiative addresses safety through the lens of physical awareness, digital identity, and psychosocial care by providing trainings in Central America, Eurasia, East Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa. The curriculum is based on knowledge harnessed from the SAFE project's regional training teams and their nearly five years of experience.

Using adult learning principles, the lesson plans cover the following:

Physical safety lessons

• Risk assessment and management - helps participants understand the different challenges they may face as media practitioners and social communicators.
• Situational awareness - aims to create a mindset and develop skills for participants' awareness of both subtle and obvious dynamics in one's environment.
• Planning - teaches participants to apply skills learned in the first two lessons in a hypothetical scenario.
• First aid - instructs participants how to handle emergency situations where they may need to assist victims of accidents until professional medical assistance is available.

Digital security lessons

• Bridging the digital-physical divide - introduces integration of physical and digital components as key drivers of holistic security.
• An introduction to social engineering - explores a potential security threat that in many cases is easily avoidable: social engineering, which occurs when an individual or an automated system exercises one or more social skills and manipulative tactics to collect fragments of information about another individual or entity to gain an advantage.
• Securing passwords - seeks to offer simple guidelines and techniques to avoid unwanted access to journalists' data, while still keeping their own rightful access open in a secure manner.
• Keeping our computers healthy - involves bringing together a number of ideas for basic digital and physical maintenance of computers, also known as digital hygiene.
• How the internet works - aims to make the idea of the internet clearer in participants' minds by introducing its components and players.
• Browser security - intends to help users know their browsers better in order to make the required changes that make browsers more secure.
• Smartphone security - clarifies how communication takes place between two or more smartphones, enabling participants to make appropriate decisions to secure their information using tools and behavioural changes.

Psychosocial lessons

• Risk assessment: Self-awareness - seeks to enable participants to become aware and conscious of the social environments they work in and how these environments have the potential to impact their physical, psychosocial, and digital well-being.
• Risk identification: Emotional lives of journalists - intends to enable participants to gain insight into their work, as well as the emotional toll it takes on them and their social lives.
• Understanding and managing stress - explores the different causes and signs of stress and what personal and social resources one has at one's disposal to enhance well-being, to the end of fostering an attitude and behaviour of ownership of one's psychosocial well-being.
• Self care: Building resilience and solidarity - reinforces the attitude of proactive ownership of one's psychosocial well-being acquired in the previous lesson by allowing people to develop a non-judgmental but value-driven attitude towards coping mechanisms.
• Psychosocial first aid - develops understanding about human responses under traumatic situations.