USAID’s Regional Academy for Security Analysis project builds regional institutional capacity to analyze data and develop evidence-based security policies to improve public safety in the Central America region (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) and reduce illegal immigration.

The Regional Academy for Security Analysis, established by USAID and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, provides training to teams of justice sector officials and civil society organizations from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to develop regional capabilities and skills to gather and analyze crime and violence data.  The project promotes evidence-based approaches to citizen security challenges for effective policy-making on violence interruption and crime prevention.  Understanding violence and criminal behavior, combined with well-established qualitative and case-based practices, can help to better identify possible solutions to public security challenges in the region. 

The project promotes interactions among government institutions, civil society organizations, and other national and international stakeholders to strengthen regional networks for the promotion, implementation, and dissemination of best practices on citizen security.

The training component of the project is complemented by hands-on experience in pilot policy projects, developed and carried out by teams of participants in their countries.  The goal of these projects is to capture lessons in citizen security, effective models of crime prevention, and best practices, and to promote replication.  The policy proposals will be enhanced with research design and methodologies to evaluate their impact. 
A policy board selects two projects per year to be funded within each of the three participating countries.  The results from the pilot projects, which represent promising crime prevention initiatives that can be measured for impact using the methodologies taught in the Academy, will be included in a catalog of best practices on citizen security that will be disseminated within a network of governmental, non-governmental, journalistic, and academic participants through a series of regional and domestic forums.  

The project also provides online courses on violence prevention and is developing a postgraduate program in criminology.