Dr. Keven E. Bermúdez is an independent MHPSS consultant working for different UN agencies and NGOs. Currently, he is involved in an IOM consultancy in Niger. One of his major lines of work has been to develop peer support groups with a rights orientation in challenging life environments.
He holds a Ph.D. in Global Health Research from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh and a Master's degree in Education from Cambridge College in Massachusetts, USA, with a focus on Counseling Psychology and Mental Health. His research focuses on community-driven responses to psychosocial challenges in unstable environments.
The people of Niger, a West African country situated along the Sahel band and a major crossroads for transnational commercial and migration routes, face multiple non-traditional and interconnected security issues challenging their survival and well-being. Over half of its population of 27 million are currently living in extreme poverty and food insecurity due to resource scarcity. Only a small percentage of Nigeriens have access to electricity services, especially in rural areas. The country also registers a high burden of both communicable and non-communicable diseases against a backdrop of weak health infrastructure. Climate change is increasingly behind natural disasters that occur periodically in Niger, like drought and flooding, which contributes to continuous out-migration that blends with international migration movements along unsafe routes continually monitored by human traffickers and criminal networks. The country’s limited resources are further stretched by the need to respond to massive displacement in the country’s border areas as a result of violent extremism in surrounding countries, resulting in increased political instability.
Faced with this wide array of non-traditional security issues, national efforts to remedy them inevitably fall short of providing lasting solutions, thus, requiring multilateral cooperation to respond to them more sustainably. International aid agencies (UN, non-governmental and country-based development agencies), in cooperation with relevant government ministries and with time-limited funding provided by international public or private donors, usually also link up with community-based structures in the most vulnerable areas of the country to collaboratively implement projects according to their respective specialty area and priority community needs.
Mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) is a form of cooperation that seeks to help people facing non-traditional security issues to gradually take control over their lives and live more healthily. Since the safety and security issues they face condition their lives so strongly and are much too hard to overcome by personal efforts alone, this form of cooperation emphasizes the importance of recognizing shared concerns and promoting internal solidarity and collective action to address them. In this way, community members whose sense of safety has been shattered and continue to be exposed to various dangers in their surrounding environment can strengthen their sense of community, as necessary to overcome often disabling levels of fear and distrust.
From this perspective, a core MHPSS action is to train community members as psychosocial support agents that help others restore their relational support systems or strengthen those that already exist, by facilitating their link with planned or ongoing community efforts to adapt available resources to meet shared security needs or even build new ones. Regular participation in this type of network fosters agency, (i.e. sense of control and self-confidence), collective efficacy, sense of belonging, trust and hope, and ownership of the action by those involved in it. It also gradually helps improve the rights environment, since any sustained joint action aiming to improve safety and security for all inadvertently also improves access to rights.
MHPSS actions have become a regular feature of international cooperation efforts in countries affected by natural disasters and mass violence due to political conflicts, where non-traditional security issues abound. However, these actions are often time-limited due to funding constraints and, therefore, often applied in emergency situations. The hope is that community capacity building in MHPSS will leave a pool of trained psychosocial agents that can carry on with this type of support and even become an association, as has occurred in different Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC).
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