Centering the people affected by crisis
Every day around the world, humanitarians deliver programs and services to people affected by conflict, disasters, and emergencies. Ensuring that these programs are accountable, inclusive and accessible to the people they are meant to serve remains a key focus for humanitarians, like Ozlem, who was deployed as an Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) Specialist to UNFPA in Cox’s Bazar.
‘I’m directly engaging with people and trying to better understand what they want, need and want to change,’ said Ozlem. ‘For me, it’s instinctive. Why would you not want to engage with the people that you are trying to serve, collaborate with, and listen to what they have to say?’
‘They might be experiencing a period of vulnerability in their lives… but you can absolutely harness their skills and their strengths. And you can get some really great insights, information, skills and knowledge from the people you’re trying to serve. So, I think that’s really important.’
While AAP is not a new concept, the past few decades have seen an increased focus on its importance in humanitarian action. In general, this includes ensuring affected people actively and meaningfully participate in the design, delivery and review humanitarian programs, sharing information in accessible ways for all people, adapting humanitarian programming based on lessons learnt and community feedback, and ensuring humanitarians are identifying and addressing gaps.
'For me, it’s instinctive. Why would you not want to engage with the people that you are trying to serve, collaborate with, and listen to what they have to say?'
Context is key
The foundation to effective, accountable and principled humanitarian action is ensuring it’s relevant to the needs of the communities they seek to serve. This requires a holistic approach to engaging and listening in a meaningful way, while also learning and adapting throughout the whole humanitarian program cycle.
‘People in organisations are becoming more aware that AAP is about everything. So, how you’re adapting, how you’re making it more appropriate, how you’re learning, how you’re making mistakes and learning from those experiences – positive and negative. It’s also about recognising that AAP is an overarching concept, but its application looks very different from context to context… Each situation is really different, and you need to apply AAP accordingly,’ said Ozlem.
The importance of understanding context has been a key theme within Ozlem’s deployment. Across UNFPA’s 12 implementing partners in Cox’s Bazar, each partner had varying levels of understanding and application of AAP, which resulted in Ozlem working closely to identify where they were at and how she could provide relevant support.
‘What I was trying to do was standardise the understanding and application of AAP. One of the first things I did was to reach out to all of our implementing partners to get an understanding of where they were and their specific needs. Then try to work out how I could provide them with tailored support in the six months that I had… You can’t just do a blanket approach and hope it will work, because it’s not necessarily the best,’ reflected Ozlem.
‘Some implementing partners had really high levels of integrating AAP into their activities, their trainings, and their policies – it was really comprehensive. So, those partners didn’t need as much support. While other organisations were very much at the start of their AAP journey.’
Bringing people on a journey
Beyond providing tailored support to implementing partners, Ozlem recognised the strength of UNFPA’s implementing partner’s relationships with the local communities they serve. She wanted to use this strength and amplify this by fostering a culture of accountability, learning and collaboration. This included the creation of an AAP working support group that met every month. She also built a library of AAP resources to support their journey long after her deployment.
‘They often worked together in either the same physical or thematic space, but they weren’t necessarily communicating about AAP. I thought it would be useful for people to get together [once a month] and talk about AAP, in terms of what they were doing, what was working, what was not working and learning from each other,’ said Ozlem.
Ozlem also acknowledged the operational tempo of humanitarian service delivery and the realities of limited time and resourcing in Cox’s Bazar. To further facilitate that culture of accountability and learning, she ensured that the resources she shared were also easy to use and accessible.
‘You know, I’d be looking at an AAP guideline that was 53 pages, or another one, which was 74 pages. And I’d essentially cut these right back down to 1-to-2-page dot points to give implementing partners the tools – to look at them, read them, talk about them and apply them straight away. I didn’t want to make this seem like another administrative burden that people had to set time aside for. I mean, if you want to get people on board with something, you need to make it easy for them,’ said Ozlem.
‘I would send people a variety of things to make it appropriate to the different learning, preferences and abilities of our implementing partners… and then by the end of my deployment, I basically had an entire resource library package, which covered everything people would need.’
'I’d be looking at an AAP guideline that was 53 pages, or another one, which was 74 pages. And I’d essentially cut these right back down to 1-to-2-page dot points to give implementing partners the tools - to look at them, read them, talk about them and apply them straight away.'
For Ozlem, she recognises that every organisation is at a different stage of their AAP journey, including local and international organisations. For the future, she hopes that the culture of accountability, learning and collaboration continues among her colleagues, and that the resource library continues to add value.
‘It seems like a lot of the implementing partners are progressing quite well, and it would be great to see them talking to each other more, working with each other too. I’d like to think that by connecting them with each other, that’s the beginning of better coordination in the field and hopefully to better outcomes.’
Disclaimer: The information and views published here are the individual’s own and do not necessarily represent the partner organisation, Australia Assists or the Australian Government’s views, positions or opinions.