Violence and Crime in Nicaragua: A Country Profile

Date
Jun 2013
The Office of Evaluation and Oversight (OVE) conducted an evaluation of a cluster of citizen security projects. The main objective was to identify what factors explained the implementation performance of the projects, and what lessons could be learned from these experiences. This Background Paper presents the results of one of these diagnostics for Nicaragua. Following the introduction, the country profile begins with an overview of the Nicaraguan context in terms of geography, demographics, economy, as well as recent political history (section II). It then builds a diagnostic that covers different forms of violence and crime (section III) as well as main risk and protective factors (section IV), based on available statistics and specialized international and local literature. In section V, the paper reviews the strategy adopted by the Government throughout the last decade to respond to main forms of violence and crime, it describes the budget allocation to citizen security over recent years. Finally, section VI presents the IDB citizen security project part of the comparative evaluation, and summarizes various exercises that OVE undertook to provide additional background information and analysis.