With two-thirds of all countries in the world experiencing a terrorist attack in 2016, terrorism has become an unprecedented threat to international peace, security and development, feeding off violent conflict. As conflicts have grown in intensity and number over the past decade, terrorist attacks have also increased and spread. According to the UN Secretary-General, preventing conflict and sustainable development should be the primary focus to change this trend; recognising that development is the best way to tackle the poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity and public services that feed despair.

In 2016, the UN Secretary-General put forward a Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism (PVE), which laid out the global recognition and imperative to address violent extremism. Based on this, UNDP developed a global framework for PVE which highlights that prevention needs to look beyond strict security concerns to development-related causes of and solutions to violent extremism, using a human rights-based approach.

As the pace of specific PVE programming has increased – due to the urgency around preventing a rise in violence and deaths as a result of extremist behaviour, so too has the pressure to find a silver bullet of ‘what works’.

A community of practice is developing to better inform PVE programming. However, the systems and tools for understanding the suitability of PVE as an approach and the impact that PVE interventions have in different contexts have not yet been available. Programming has been criticised for not sufficiently testing assumptions with systematic scientific and empirically based research.

The objective of this toolkit is to help close this gap. It is designed as a living document for UNDP practitioners and partners who are working on programmes that are either specifically focused on PVE, or have PVE-relevant elements to them. It draws on best practice for design, monitoring and evaluation in complex, conflict contexts adapting these for PVE programming. The toolkit includes modules, processes and approaches as well as an indicator bank that can be used within UNDP, with national and communitylevel partners and as part of a capacity-building approach around monitoring.