Every Casualty Counts is a unique organisation that focuses exclusively on promoting and supporting the effective recording of all casualties of armed violence, wherever they occur.  They work with civil society, states, and intergovernmental organisations globally and strive to ensure that every death from armed conflict is recognised as an individual human tragedy, not just a statistic.

In July 2024 Every Casualty Counts received a grant from the Edith M Ellis 1985 Charitable Trust to support their work with casualty recording organisations in East Africa.  Thanks to the grant, together with other funding obtained for this area of work, the Charity was able to recruit a new staff member to focus on capacity building for their partner organisations in Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Ethiopia.  Bilan is a recent graduate with an international law degree at the University of Sussex.  As a native Somali and Arabic speaker, as well as a passionate human rights advocate, she has been a huge asset to the small team.

Every Casualty Counts originally hoped to work with 12 organisations on building their capacity, but this has increased to 17.  There was a huge amount of interest among partner organisations to participate in this training and, with the additional funding, they felt they could stretch themselves a little further.

Bilan and Frederica, the Network Director, have worked with all 17 organisations to identify strengths and weaknesses in their current casualty recording practices.  They are now working on helping each organisation develop an effective and formalised methodology for documenting information consistently, accurately, and safely.  To assist with this, Every Casualty Counts have also translated the Standards for Casualty Recording – the universal manual for best practice in casualty recording – into Somali.

So far, three expert-led training webinars have been held for the project group, focusing on the topics they considered priorities.  These were data management, geolocation tools, and data security.  More webinars are planned, together with an in-person meeting for the Somali organisations before the end of summer 2025.

Photo credit: Anja Niedringhaus/AP.