It is becoming increasingly clear that effective implementation of humanitarian aid requires, first and foremost, trust of the communities in which they work. Whilst there remains considerable value in the distribution of needed resources (e.g. food, water and medicine), the evolving needs of people in crisis means that proper communication is essential.
The Global Humanitarian Overview, produced annually by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), discusses the need for proper community engagement practices during humanitarian responses and the negative impacts when these practices are missing. The report also identifies several core strategies that make up a detailed and complex aid response which encourages community feedback. Through this understanding, the UN OCHA in the Global Humanitarian Overview created the Enhanced Humanitarian Programme Cycle.
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Humanitarian Programme Cycle
The cycle stipulates three areas of community-driven aid: Meaningful and systematic monitoring; Stronger, more relevant analysis; and Prioritized and people-centred response.
On Meaningful and systematic monitoring – the global community, both governmental and non-governmental, is aware that reactive monitoring is only part of the process. Proactive monitoring is necessary to fully gain an insight to a population-in-need’s wishes and feelings around varying types of assistance. Additionally, this monitoring should be comprehensive in its nature, covering the principal reason behind why aid is needed in a region and above that, the extrapolated concerns of those communities. The gathering of information during humanitarian assistance should also continue beyond the time point of delivery, in order to ensure that the help meets the population’s immediate needs, but also meets their extended needs in order to better promote resiliency.
Stronger, more relevant analysis of this collected monitoring data is key to streamlining future aid delivery. As was mentioned in a previous RAN news post “A chaotic start to recovery in the Bahamas”, 23rd September 2019, it is possible to have a deluge of disorganised aid. As was seen in the Bahamas, post-hurricane Dorian, this type of disorganised aid can often cause more harm than good. These types of humanitarian responses can be prevented through an understanding and proper analysis of data. This data must be easily recorded and freely accessible to a wide number of agencies and charities in order to be used in the most efficient way.
Putting communities at the heart of a response – a Prioritized and people-centred response – will ensure that trust is rapidly gained. The gaining of community trust has obvious short and long-term benefits, especially when examining how Ebola was tackled in West Africa and continues to be so in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Whilst the two different outbreaks presented very different humanitarian challenges, it was clear that there can be sometimes tragic consequences of ignoring cultural and local customs. In the short-term, understanding burial and funerary practices allowed the response to be tailored (i.e. using clear body bags) such that communities were protected while still able to respectfully bury their deceased. With this knowledge, further methods were developed (i.e. individual transparent treatment tents that enable family interaction) that have been used in the DRC to treat Ebola virus infections in a community trusted manner.
The further identification by the UN OCHA of the relevance and necessity of a coordinated approach to community engagement should be warmly welcomed. We hope to see more and more NGOs and communities working together and sharing data, which will enable a considerably more effective aid response to future disasters. RAN continues to research and understand the barriers to this type of collaboration and is working to facilitate a more integrated humanitarian community.
