Below is a list of questions to serve as a starting framework for the discussion in this thread:
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How can the use of community engagement create better communication between populations and NGOs?
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How should NGOs begin to use community engagement as a tool to effectively deliver aid?
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How can NGO’s provide information and listen to community grievances in an easy way to ensure proper community engagement?
At GlobalGiving, we have the opportunity to work with, fund and learn from community-driven organisations, both in the development and humanitarian context. GlobalGiving's approach is to support local organisations for the long-term following disasters. Immediately following the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015, the team at Accountability Lab Nepal (a group that campaign for and celebrate good practice in accountability and integrity) began to mobilise their networks across the affected districts. Starting informally then quickly launching the Mobile Citizen Helpdesks, their team of Community Associate volunteers (local people from the community) became the connecting point for many community members to services, the government and funders. They met people in person, and had a phone hotline, in areas that had been damaged or destroyed, in hospitals and in refuges. One month after the earthquake, Narayan, Accountability Lab Nepal's Director told us:
"We are visiting the affected areas with the help of our volunteers, collecting information from direct interaction with victims, listening to their problems, helping them obtain appropriate information, and connecting them with relief organizations and the government. We are also working with the government to assess their data received from citizens through the mobile hotline 1234, where more than 25,000 voice calls have been received directly from citizens."
"One of the biggest challenges is getting the right information about the disaster. The media reports and government data are frequently not available. Other key challenges in the aid delivery are: lack of coordination among relief organization and government; unequal and unfair distribution of relief packages; difficulty reaching the most affected areas in remote districts."
(Read more here).
What Accountability Lab did was open up a dialogue directly with people affected; where I believe accountability needs to begin - with citizens; people first. There approach helped people feel heard, gave them the opportunity to record their issues and connected them to accurate information. Community Associates helped to sign post people to support and follow up with officials on their issues.
I met some rural community members that had been connected to the Citizen Helpdesks some 18 months after the earthquakes. They gathered together in the community meeting spot. Facilitated by an Accountability Lab Community Associate they shared ongoing issues they faced. Notably, I was told, more women were vocal about issues than they had been in the past. Issues now have expanded to migration issues amongst continued problems with rebuilding lives following the earthquakes. Community engagement is absolutely vital for efficient and effective aid delivery, and to ensure that the aid system is accountable to the community they serve.
Thank you Rachel for a really great example of community engagement. Nancy Pearson who I know through CVT brought up that communtiy engagement is an extremely important part of effective aid delivery. Understanding what communities need, can help to deliver the items most wanted/needed while creating validity in the work of private sector or government. In recent times, we've seen how aid intended to help has backfired because it did not meet the needs of the people and seemed inconsiderate.
Without proper engagement, essentials can often go overlooked, especially for minorities in the communities. Women may not receive hygiene products they need. Or rural communities may receive little/to no aid depending if humaniatarian organizations may reach far in scope. This can also be led back to communication between different entities serving in post-disaster areas. Reaching out to other bodies to let them know what the community needs, or encouraging them to continue to reach out to members to listen to problems, questions, concerns.
Rachel - thank you for sharing this information about Accountability Lab Nepal. You wrote:
I met some rural community members that had been connected to the Citizen Helpdesks some 18 months after the earthquakes. They gathered together in the community meeting spot. Facilitated by an Accountability Lab Community Associate they shared ongoing issues they faced. Notably, I was told, more women were vocal about issues than they had been in the past.
I'm especially interested to hear more about the successful engagement of community women's voices. Was this due to the helpline, the face-to-face helpdesks, a combination?
Rachel and Nancy, thank you and your comments help to remind me of the Liberian conflict, and the courageous role and awesome responsibility of the women Liberia took upon themselves in charting a new course for the country post-conflict, towards reconciliation, community activism for positive change and lasting peace. See http://theconversation.com/how-women-bring-about-peace-and-change-in-lib...
I was a Peace Corps worker in rural Liberia over 30 years ago; returned as an international elections monitor that brought to power the Taylor regime - which still troubles me to this day; managed a program to repatriate Liberian refugees from neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea, and more recently the Ebola response of 2015. In all of these experiences, I have witnessed the changing role of women in Liberian society, culminating in the election of the first woman president in Africa - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. It's now up to the newly elected president Weah to carry forward to legacy of Sirleaf, and the Women in Peace Building Network (WIPNET) will be watching and raising their voices. How many women will be joining the Weah administration? What are the policies and investments that will ensure gender equality in education, health, employment, and all other sectors of society?
Hello! Thanks for the follow up comment. I reached out to Kalpana who leads this work at ALN to offer more colour from her direct experience. I'll update again when she gets back to me. What I have heard from her and the team is that they quickly identified that women were not contibuting as much in open forum meetings so they decided to start women's only specific groups. Here is a short update on their work with women: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/provide-helpdesks-for-nepal-earthq... There other reports can also bring more colour as to how the helpdeck approach has worked in practice.
Hello! Thanks for the follow up comment. I reached out to Kalpana who leads this work at ALN to offer more colour from her direct experience. I'll update again when she gets back to me. What I have heard from her and the team is that they quickly identified that women were not contibuting as much in open forum meetings so they decided to start women's only specific groups. Here is a short update on their work with women: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/provide-helpdesks-for-nepal-earthq... There other reports can also bring more colour as to how the helpdeck approach has worked in practice.
These are great stories. I'm wondering if any of you can give examples of strategies your organization used to build trust in communities, especially if you did not have an established presence there beforehand.
I think this is a really great question, especially considering that when there aren't disasters that require a NGOs immediate assitance when local require aid, there needs to be another way to build trust when providing other forms of non-immediate aid. This can usually be easier since it's a private presence rather than a government presence. But I think it also maybe an important to note when NGOs from western parts of the world operate in many places that may have distrust for them. It can be very difficult to overcome that barrier or even taboo for the populations they're trying to aid. I'm not quite sure what organizations do try to do, except meeting communtiy members and working with local businesses to get to know the community. I'd be interested to here what you and the other conversation leaders think!
This is a good questions - especially, as Shyla points out - as we move out of the disaster Relief phases and into the Recovery and Rebuild efforts where community involvement and, really, community-led initiatives are required for long-term viability.
A few months following the 2011 Japanese tsunami, we were involved in a recovery project in the communty of Ofunato in Japan. We had no presence or experience in Japan (a country, similar to the US, that doesn't often request external iNGO help). We had a large corporate partner that, via its philanthropic arm, was interested in a brick-and-mortar project in the area. In both an effort to build community trust and develop a community-led initiative, we conducted interviews and organized numerous community meetings over a period of many weeks to both build trust and enable the community members themselves determine the specifics. Our role was specifically to be facilitators more than problem-solvers. We used the basic principles of human-center design (formalized and packeged most publically by IDEO) and helped create a partnership among the corporate funder, the community itself, another NGO and us (as faciliators and ultimately project managers). In the end, the community designed and developed a center that specifically targeted elders and encourages multi-generational exchanges. It now serves both as a phyical community center and, since it was created by and now owned and run by the community, it meets directly the needs and traditions of the community, A local non-profit was formed to ensure long-term sustainability,
This type of engagement - this formalized ommunity-led design process - is not explicity new to most of us but proceeding in a very measured, bottom-up process in which we and the major donor were willing to follow rather than lead was unique to us then. It allowed the community to know and understand as much as we of them and was absolutely instrumental in establishing trust. It did require the corporate partner to move out of its comfort zone of the usual 'command-and-control' approach of donor-driven funding and it did require a more patient approach but in hindsight and in that particular community, I cannot imagine a top-down approach working.
Jeannie, Thanks for the question.
GlobalGiving takes the following approach: We, ourselves, do not have presence in communities. Instead we have built a network of more than 4000 organisations in 150+ countries (many of whom are locally led and registered in their country of work). We build relationships with these organisations long term and provide them with access to funding, fundraising opportunities, new skills and knowledge, and expert support from professionals. This long term commitment working with local organisations means that if a disaster strikes in an area, it is possible, even probable, that we will have contacts and networks with community organisations. Our hypothesis is that organisations that are in the community before a disaster and have grounding in the communities (that is include community in decision making) will be able to mobilise fast, have already built community trust, and be responsive to immediate and long term needs.
An example is ECCA Nepal - a Kathmandu based NGO that has been operating for some decades through a network of volunteers - their long term aim is to mobilise young people to be more environmental conscious and improve communities through provision of WASH programmes linked often to schools. We provided a small grant to ECCA after the earthquake so that they could mobilise their volunteer network, use their chlorine based water solution and technology and reach communities in remote areas. Here is the link to their initial report following the earthquake and you can explore how their work has progressed over time in the recovery phase: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/support-nepal-earthquake-relief/re...
Here is some further reading on our approach: https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/better-approach-to-disaster-recovery/
Another interesting example of community engagement contributing to better communication is a project of the American Refugee Committee called 'Kuja Kuja". Check out the porject here: http://arcrelief.org/kuja-kuja/
I'm enjoying hearing about so many examples of community-led engagement and trust-building in the programs mentioned on this page. It actually reminds me of something I saw in the early years of my nonprofit career in human services. We used to think "the professionals" knew best, and whether it was chemical addiction, domestic violence, poverty, etc. -- we thought our "clients" needed to follow programs we set up. Fortunately, this changed over the years as we started asking those who were affected most by these isssues, "what would help?". Even in nonprofits here in the United States, across all kinds of issue areas, we have a great sense of constituency, or citizen-led approaches. It is not surprising to me this is true in the sector's international work, as well.
Over the past several decades, extreme global climate events are becoming even more severe and frequent, resulting in major humanitarian crises and large population displacements – Climate Refugees. The worst or most affected are primarily in low-income and fragile states.
Indeed, climate change is a “risk multiplier” that exacerbates human deprivations, migration and conflict. The discussion on community engagement is very much germane, certainly as a “risk minimizer” in efforts towards linking climate change adaptation and conflict mitigation, which could benefit sustainable development, promote stability and reduce the burden of human migration on high-income cities and states.
I have been reading a couple of IISD publications that may be of interest to other New Tactics discussants.
"Efforts to help fragile states move onto a path toward stability and sustainability continue to face enormous challenges. Climate change is one of these challenges. This is true for a number of reasons, including: the high exposure of many fragile states to climate risks; their economic reliance on climate-dependent sectors (particularly rain-fed agriculture); and their histories of conflict, poverty and weak governance, which all serve to increase vulnerability to climate change. A failure to consider and address climate change and risks will undermine peacebuilding programs and projects, and threaten their long-term sustainability." http://www.iisd.org/project/managing-climate-risks-fragile-states
"Peacebuilding processes should also involve multiple stakeholders, including civil society, local actors and government (despite possible corruption problems), in order to build capacity, foster ownership and ensure the durability of any changes to the brickwork of a society (UN PBSO, 2013)." https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/promoting-climate-...