The SCG Mission
SCG assists donor countries to deliver sustainable and impactful foreign assistance and recipient countries to build effective, responsive, accountable, and legitimate institutions that protect and govern those they serve.
Strategic Capacity Group’s mission is to enhance the ability of the United States and its partners to build strategic security sector capacity worldwide.
The SCG Approach
SCG works alongside and in support of partners, including police, gendarme, military, corrections, and border security forces and institutions, in highly challenging environments and under imperative strategic circumstances, to embed knowledge and processes so they can be replicated over time and sustained by the recipient after assistance ends.
We integrate and align proven international practices and techniques with localized needs, requirements, and expertise. Evidence is integrated into decision making, informing policy, programming, budgeting, operations, and training using continuous learning processes and feedback loops. Policies, processes, and practices are tailored to ensure recipients can implement and replicate them, enhancing the likelihood of their dissemination, adoption, and replication over time. When assistance is provided through a strategic capacity building approach, it enhances the likelihood of impactful and sustainable results.
The SCG Difference
Strategic Capacity Group consistently delivers excellence and value—bespoke, responsive, evidence-based solutions to complex problems in highly challenging environments and under imperative strategic circumstances. At SCG, Return on Investment (ROI) guides design decisions across the project cycle.
At SCG, we deliver. Quality. Results. Excellence.
The SCG Story
SCG began with an idea. Reforming security sectors rather than merely provisioning them can break the cycle of dependency on foreign assistance. Despite years of effort and billions of dollars in donor funding, recipient countries continued to struggle to contain terrorism, organized crime, and other sources of instability and to protect their governments and their citizens.
Dr. Querine Hanlon founded SCG in 2013 on the premise that donor and recipient efforts are most sustainable and successful when assistance is designed and delivered as part of a strategic capacity building approach. As Dr. Hanlon and fellow founding Board Member Dr. Richard H. Shultz, Jr., wrote in Prioritizing Security Sector Reform, today’s fragile environments feature states that cannot fulfill their most basic function because “security sector institutions and forces are absent, ineffective, predatory, or illegitimate…. An SSR approach builds forces that protect populations and partner governments rather than exploit and prey on them. Such an approach also provides a smaller-footprint, less costly alternative to a larger nation-building effort. Because it focuses more narrowly on the security sector but with an approach aimed at improving how the security sector is governed, SSR is designed to address the security sector dysfunctions that impede other social, political, and economic reforms.”
Dr. Querine Hanlon’s capacity building and institution building experience in government and implementing programs for both the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of State shaped SCG’s mission and SCG’s articulation of a clear problem – solution set. The prevailing approach of funding tools and equipment over sustainable reform—strategic capacity building—proved shortsighted, created misleading evidence of progress, and generated very low return on investment (ROI). Reflected in both the name and mission of the organization, strategic capacity building transforms security sectors by building human capacity through training and advising and develops institutional capacity by strengthening iterative functions and processes such as operations, planning, training, human resources, and budgeting. By embedding tools—and the know-how to use them—into institutional processes, SCG ensures reforms can be replicated over time. Put simply, SCG’s goal is “change that sticks.”
In the more than a decade since its founding, SCG remains at the forefront of shaping the future of security sector reform through innovative programming. From its first project supporting border security reforms in Tunisia, SCG’s programming has expanded worldwide to include maritime security and forensics reform in the Caribbean, media and strategic communications programming in Asia and Africa, training institution and curricular reform in Africa and Latin America, and police, public order, and corrections reforms worldwide. SCG has also served as a trusted partner, advising governments and organizations how to design and implement innovative and impactful security sector programming around the world that advances security and delivers measurable results.
