During this traineeship, we will be working with our client Justice for Prosperity. Justice for
Prosperity is an NGO working in the human rights and social justice domain, precisely on
SDG number 16: “Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions” and number 10: “Reduced
inequalities.”

They have experience in international intelligence, security, and diplomacy, and with these skills aim to “work hard to make a real difference in the fight against terrorism, organized crime and subversive powers, protecting those under siege.” Justice for Prosperity brings innovations to peace and security and provides a pathway to opportunity, stability, and inclusive growth. Some examples of things that they do include giving voice to the victims of violent conflict, raising awareness, promoting international cooperation, or using technology for good. They perform research to then put that knowledge in the hands of those that stand up for our democracies.

Our client
In this project, we will work to understand how we can create more awareness and make an impact to protect journalists, human rights defenders, political activists, and those that support them. We will do so through community and stakeholder engagement, building and spreading surveys, conducting in-depth interviews, bench market analysis, and building a communication strategy to spread the word globally. Furthermore, we will be conducting OSINT (Open-source intelligence) research into the aggressors and will produce a network analysis. The project focuses on: combining JfP’s offerings, analyzing the stakeholder field, analyzing the market, and reaching the target community & client.

The SDG’s we will be working on
Justice for Prosperity is committed to protecting those that are vulnerable to and victims of violent conflict. They seek to give these people a voice whilst keeping them safe from potential harm. In addition to this and the reinforcement of these goals, Justice for Prosperity is committed to the values and institutions that keep our democracies safe by uncovering and making the public aware of subversive activities that are otherwise so not apparent. Therefore, in our traineeship and throughout this 15-week-long project we will be focusing on the SDGs number 10 and 16.

Reflecting on the assignment
This traineeship is a great opportunity to hear different perspectives of our team members on specific issues. The challenges we are assigned require intensive research and a collective approach as these issues are very multi-dimensional. We, as a team, have learned and decided on our research approach during the first two weeks. We have set our goals and decided on our methods. From next week onwards we will start with the data collection. So far we have learned how to plan and operationalize the project according to the end goal we want. Our topic requires a lot of creativity and critical thinking, where we can extensively exercise our community engagement skills and abilities to come up with creative content and innovative outreach ideas as well as approaches to the audience. Moreover, the client has given us the opportunity to explore different paths with regards to the assignment, and to follow the ones we most prefer. They have granted us with much liberty, which makes the experience more pleasurable. Even though having so much liberty is something nice, it can also sometimes be overwhelming, as there are infinite possibilities of ways to tackle the assignment.

So far, we have had 3 SDG talks which walked us through the whole idea of SDGs from their core values to their actual implementation in real-world issues. We also learned about the challenges that may come up when applying SDGs to projects we are assigned to. While delving deeper into the SDGs, we are able to reflect on what we have learned and how we could better apply these theories to the project for our client.