PRI to pilot a new model of achieving effective scale-up of community service in East Africa

PRI is pleased to be able to continue its work supporting community service and other alternatives to imprisonment in three countries of East Africa through a new grant from the UK Government (UKAid).

The project – Excellence in Training on Rehabilitation in Africa or ‘EXTRA’ – will pilot a new model to increase the effectiveness of the delivery of Community Service Orders in specific regions of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Activities include capacity-building workshops for stakeholders, supporting empowerment programmes for offenders, multi-agency meetings and public awareness campaigns. Working with our partners, the government departments responsible for Community Service Orders in the three countries, we will target:

• those who impose community sentences (magistrates and judges)
• those who implement community sentences (probation officers, placement supervisors), and
• the public.

PRI’s previous projects in these countries have tended to focus on one or two of these elements, however, through our research we’ve identified that all three are needed simultaneously to effectively increase the use of community service. We are now testing this premise through the EXTRA project.

In order to test this three-pronged approach, PRI will work with national research or academic institutions to carry out baseline research before and after the activities to assess whether this model is effective and make recommendations for further developments or scale-up.

Find out more about PRI’s work on alternatives to imprisonment in East Africa.