Developing a community-led auditing mechanism for humanitarian aid delivery
Role: Coach
Collaboration with: Outsight International
#Capacity building
Background
Global estimates place fifteen percent of all people to have some kind of disability. This percentage is even higher in humanitarian settings. As a population ages, the proportion who experience a disability also increases. In some cases, estimates suggest 46% of over 70s have a disability.
While the humanitarian community is aware of the situation, this has not translated into significant action. People living with disabilities (PWDs) and older people (OP) have yet to fully and effectively participate in decision-making and the process of designing, developing, monitoring and evaluating humanitarian responses.
Objective
The social model of disability reframes the disability by stating PWDs are held back by the barriers posed by society, not by their impairment or difference. ELHRA’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund selected grantees who proposed innovative solutions that effectively address PWDs and OPs’ need to meaningfully participate in humanitarian responses.
As part of a program aiming to measure the effectiveness of the developed solutions, I coached a grantee team formed of members from TearFund and the Ethiopian Guenet Church Development & Welfare Organisation (EGCDWO).
The project focused on developing a community-lead auditing mechanism for humanitarian aid delivery in the Shashemene refugee camp in Ethiopia. In this context, effectiveness aimed to measure whether the team's innovation:
- Considers people with disabilities and/or older people’s own definition of meaningful participation
- Removes existing barriers to inclusion such as; culture, identity, physical, communication, legal, or policy
- Removes existing barriers to meaningful participation
- Involves people with disabilities and/or older people in the decision-making, the process of designing, developing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating the innovation.
- Could be applied to other contexts including partner organizations
Methodology
The work was delivered across 5 workshops and 5 individual team coaching sessions that were spread over 18 months, which was the grant’s duration. The teams had already defined their activates and workplan as part of their grant application. My work with the team was to help them think more critically about their assumptions and critical hypotheses, define the activities to test these hypotheses and define the right metrics to evaluate effectiveness.
Through the 5 workshops we:
- Reviewed the proposed solution, mapped out the change pathways and identified the hidden assumptions that were at the foundation of the proposed solution
- Broke down the assumptions into granular components, defined the confidence level the team had with each of these assumptions and turned the critical ones into hypotheses to be tested
- Developed a testing plan and metrics for evaluating the results
- Evaluated the results to identify learnings for future replications of the project
My work with the Ethiopian project team went in parallel with the coaching of another project based in Indonesia led by a colleague. The workshops also provided an opportunity to get the two teams together, share challenges and learnings. In between the workshops, we had individual review sessions with each team to discuss and give feedback on their work and support them in the specific challenges they faced.
(Image credit: Tearfund)
Challenges:
- The project team included people with disabilities, so the coaching activities needed to be designed in an inclusive way. This was a challenge for us coaches, but we worked hand in hand with project teams, receiving and incorporating feedback into our process at every step.
- Ongoing conflict in the region caused project members to struggle with managing priorities and this caused challenges with sticking to the defined timelines. Flexible timelines were negotiated with ELHRA to allow the team to complete their activities in an effective way.
Results
The team’s innovation addressed the inclusion needs of older people and people with disabilities mainly by addressing organizational capacity barriers of older people associations (OPAs) and associations of people with disabilities (APDs), and by creating a platform through which OPAs and APDs can collaborate with humanitarian actors to impulse inclusive humanitarian response.
The project enabled OPA and APDs to play an active role in realizing inclusive humanitarian actions by enabling them:
- to co-design a new inclusion auditing tool to assess whether the work of humanitarian actors are inclusive to their communities or not
- to audit humanitarian actors using this tool
- to actively participate in the development of an inclusive humanitarian strategy based on the audit results
13 organisations were audited and assessed by PWD and OP, 7 self-help groups were formed and PWDs started taking active leadership roles in capacity building trainings in their organisations. More details can be found on ELHRA’s page dedicated to the project.