As her assignment in Abu Jubayhah, South Kordofan, draws to a close, Reem Koman can still recall the question people asked her most when she introduced herself as a United Nations Volunteer with the Department of Safety and Security: why would a young woman volunteer for a security department in a remote and rural location?
For some community members and local partners, seeing a woman in a security role was new. Reem answered the recurrent question by explaining what UNDSS does and the relevance and value people who know the community from the inside bring to the role of UNDSS as an enabler.
For more than three months, Reem served as a Community Liaison Assistant (CLA) in Abu Jubayhah, one of six CLAs supported by the Sudan Humanitarian Fund. Her main job was to deepen community acceptance and accessby embedding herself in communities and building relationships with local authorities, community leaders and humanitarian partners. Those trusted engagements gave UNDSS a depth and breadth of the security situation that could not be attained through formal approaches alone.
Reem went beyond incident counts to add qualitative value to what was known or assessed, tracked changes in road accessibility and served as the last mile source of verification to complement the work of Field Security Associates deployed in locations with UN presence. She frequently met with local NGOs under the Saving Lives Together (SLT) framework to exchange information on safety, access, and general humanitarian developments in the area.
Her work also reached beyond the meeting room. Reem visited women in the camps in Abu Jubayhah to understand the details behind the numbers in reports and on maps showing direction of travel of civilians displaced due to insecurity. She recalls an experience when she applied lessons from the CLA orientation training and was able to offer a referral when her interactions revealed concerns about gender-based violence.
"I learned a lot from engaging with the community, IDPs, the host community, community leaders and youth," she said.
Being present in an area where there was no UN presence, Reem was the face of the UN, understood the local context and could connect with people quickly. What she learned gave UNDSS firsthand details to enable frequent field missions from Kosti. Importantly, Reem was offered as a local guide and joined and actively supported missions for OCHA, WFP, UNHCR and UNICEF. She briefed teams on access and local conditions before they travelled, introduced them to key stakeholders and helped them adjust when security conditions changed.
"The situation changes rapidly because of the war," Reem said.
Conflict and physical access challenges could upend a plan with little notice. Each time conditions changed, Reem used her established community networks to understand the situation, shared her updates with the Field Security Associates and Area Security Adviser, and consulted alerts and advisories to help teams with alternatives or sound choices for their safety and security.
Looking back over her months in Abu Jubayhah, Reem's experience strengthens the case for the CLA role within the Department, particularly in areas where there are significant UN activities through implementing partners but limited or no UN presence. It also affords a concrete tool that responds to several years of exploring how community acceptance and access can be integrated into the Security Risk Management Process. Trust with local authorities opened doors for humanitarian teams and kept information flowing when conditions grew tense. Community-based personnel offered realistic inputs on risks and opportunities that visiting field missions for short periods would have missed.
Acceptance and Access are vital elements of security that enable safe delivery of assistance in hard-to-reach areas, especially in a complex emergency like the South Kordofan.
"Strengthening communication and building trust with local authorities and partners has been very important and impactful," she said. "As the project draws to a close, I am convinced that UN volunteer Community Liaison Assistants belong to safety and security and have complementary value to the overarching role of trained and experienced security professionals."