Citizen voices to aid in Nepal earthquake recovery

Our director, Nick van Praag, is in Kathmandu this week. He is going to Nepal to establish links with organizations on the ground, meet as many stakeholders as possible and get a good overview of the situation on the ground.

We are excited to be part of the Common Feedback Project, which provides a comprehensive set of common tools as single source of feedback data. Our role is to provide the agencies involved in the response to the earthquake with real-time feedback from affected people. This information will be fed into programme management and aims to lead to course corrections during the response.

Once we have a hold of the most important issues, we will start drafting questions. The aim is to surface things that are important to affected people and amenable to action by aid managers. The former want aid that is more responsive to their needs, as they see them, the latter want feedback that helps inform their decision-making—perceptions to which they can respond.

We will look at the perceptions around following areas, which will offer insight into program effectiveness and efficiency:

• Relationships: the nature of the relationship between the people affected by the earthquake and the agencies through questions related to trust, competence, respect, responsiveness, and so on.
• Services: covering the nuts and bolts of the humanitarian response: perceptions on the quality, timeliness, and relevance of services like protection, camp management, shelter, water, sanitation, the distribution of non-food items.
• Agency: whether people feel enabled to contribute to finding solutions or, conversely, if they see themselves as passive recipients of aid.
• Outcomes: affected people’s perceptions of outcomes. This is accomplished by asking affected people how they see progress against improvements in their living conditions and desired program outcomes.

Our drafted questions will be tested in focus groups at the end of the week, to make sure these are the most relevant ones and formulated in a clear and unambiguous way. Once we have tested these, we will collect data with our local partners - Accountability Lab - on a bi-weekly basis.

We look forward to the first insights and are happy to be able to give those affected by the earthquake a voice, giving their views influence over implementation of the humanitarian programming. Thanks so much to our donors, who are making this possible!

Links:

• http://www.groundtruthsolutions.org