The truth is on the ground

“All too often, humanitarian agencies are just not connecting with the people whom they’re trying to help.” Photo: A focus group discussion organised by the Listen Learn Act project in Makaisingh, Gorka District, Nepal in December 2015. © Nik Rilkoff/DCA

By Erik Johnson (*)

“They give us food items like rice, oil and flour. What to do with these items when we do not have kitchens? We want cash; we want to feel as human beings and not humiliated all the time. I want to buy chocolate and candies for my children as I used to do in Syria. I do not want them to feel deprived all the time, and I do not want to feel that I cannot bring them anything.” So says a Syrian refugee man in an interview conducted by DanChurchAid’s Local to Global Protection project in an effort to try to understand how we, the foreigners, can better design and implement our aid interventions to support what families are already doing for themselves.

When I share the key findings of this research with other aid workers, they all shake their heads in recognition, all too familiar with how often international aid agencies get it wrong.

That’s why I’m proud to be part of a project like Local to Global and of the Listen Learn Act project, which are both trying to find new ways to solve the fundamental disconnect that lies at the heart of this problem: the inability of aid agencies to help those affected by disaster and conflict gain access to external humanitarian assistance, but to do so on their own terms, and in a way that supports their own capacities.

The Sphere Project is a close collaborator in this project, and we’ll be working together to inform each other’s work as we roll out the (CHS), as well as to share what we learn about measuring quality and accountability with the wider humanitarian community.

Ground truthing refers to any process where information that’s inferred – such as the understanding that aid will actually help in an emergency – is compared to information from direct observation on the ground. It’s been used in fields as diverse as space navigation – where measurements on the ground are compared to those from satellites – to marketing and machine learning.

What Keystone Accountability has done is to bring ground truthing to humanitarian aid, and the results they’ve found are shocking; all too often, humanitarian agencies are just not connecting with the people whom they’re trying to help.

Ground truthing promises to change that through an innovative method of information-gathering. Through asking affected people just five or so questions, and asking them again and again every few months, ground truthing can provide a kind of “heartbeat,” or vital sign for agencies to know how they’re meeting people’s basic expectations.

The Listen Learn Act project is piloting this approach in four countries over the next 18 months. It’s going to be an exciting journey, and one that will doubtless surprise all of us as we try to solve one the most intractable problems in international humanitarian action – a problem whose journey can be traced back to the Rwanda refugee crisis of the mid-90’s, which gave birth to initiatives like the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership, the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action, People In Aid and the Sphere Project.

In February, the Listen Learn Act team and a Sphere staff member will travel to Lebanon to introduce the ground truthing pilot to the four organisations that will be taking part there.

We will reach out to others who are also strengthening their quality and accountability focus, to ensure that all of what we are learning as a humanitarian community is shared as widely as possible. And we will start the conversation about the training resources that Listen Learn Act and Sphere can develop and disseminate in 2016 and beyond, to ensure that both the CHS and technical standards are integral to our approach to quality and accountability.

The CHS is big step forward in providing a common framework for the widest possible number of agencies on the issues of quality and accountability. But I’m also pretty sure that while a better and more universal standard is a pre-requisite to more accountability in humanitarian action, standards alone are not enough. We need more feedback, more systematically gathered, to empower agencies to better respond. That’s what Listen Learn Act is all about.

In the coming months, I and others involved in this project will be blogging, tweeting and documenting our learning and connecting with others, including at the World Humanitarian Summit in May of this year.

We’ve come a long way since the Rwanda crisis, but there’s still a long way to go.

(*) Erik Johnson is Head of Humanitarian Response at DanChurchAid and was a member of the Sphere Board until December 2015. DanChurchAid (through the ACT Alliance) and Save the Children are both represented in the Sphere Project Board.