Hopefully you are familiar with ECB’s Good Enough Guide (GEG) (see this previous blog post) and its communication materials. This week, we have interviewed Lucy Heaven Taylor, an AIM Advisor from Oxfam GB, to hear the fascinating story of how these materials were developed! Lucy co-managed this project, and this is what we found out:
Soon after the publishing of the GEG, ECHO announced a call for proposals for developing inter-agency capacity. Given the popularity of the Guide, the Accountability and Impact Measurement (AIM) Advisors and Oxfam decided to propose a project to develop materials to communicate the important principles of the GEG to agency staff and beneficiaries.
First, Lucy and Julian Srodecki, ex-AIM adviser for World Vision, project co-managers, conducted a large survey of practitioners through Survey Monkey and key informant interviews in order to find out what forms of communication were prefered. From hundreds of responses, they found that posters and leaflets were the most popular materials used to communicate key messages.
They then moved on to conduct a literature review on the practice of communications among different cultures. This uncovered useful information, such as the fact that the color red does not universally signify “stop.” They learned that in order to create materials and images to which people will respond and relate, the materials needed to be developed with the people themselves.
Five regions were chosen in which to develop the materials: Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia. The idea was to produce context-specific images in each of the regions as examples for humanitarian organizations, so that they could develop materials appropriate to their own geographic and linguistic context. ECB staff went to Bolivia, Kenya, Lebanon, Bangladesh and Myanmar to work on the materials with disaster affected people and local artists. The artist in each country created images to represent the people’s perceptions of disasters, of their rights and of themselves. The community members provided feedback on the images until the artist got it right. For example, in Bangladesh the artist created an image of somebody pointing, but the community thought he was holding a gun! As you can see, their feedback was crucial! Once the drawing was approved, the image was printed and tested in the same community.
It was interesting for the ECB staff to find that the community members prefered colored drawings to line drawings or photographs. They also prefered figures of people looking at them with recognizable facial features. In addition, it was discovered that people like to see images of themselves not exactly how they look, but instead represented in a more positive light.
Initially it was planned that the posters and leaflets would have no words because of a largely illiterate audience, but it proved to be too difficult to portray the messages. Thus it was decided that the materials would have words and a literate person could relay the message to those needing assistance. The specific wording for the posters and leaflets was agreed upon by the steering committee for the project. Half of the posters were designed for beneficiaries, to be displayed in public to raise awareness of people’s rights. Other posters were developed for agency staff, to raise awareness of the practice of accountability and to be posted in offices. The leaflets were designed to teach the principles of accountability and the GEG to agency staff. Both were printed in English, Arabic, Bangla, Burmese, Spanish and French.
The videos were developed in a similar consultative fashion, with disaster affected communities in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Bolivia. These videos show staff and beneficiaries talking about the principles of the GEG, and they are designed to be viewed by agency staff for training purposes.
The project was truly a collaboration of member agencies of the ECB. It was co-led by Oxfam and World Vision, with a Steering Committee comprising of a cross-section of members, including CARE, Mercy Corps and ECB secretariat staff. The field work was undertaken by World Vision, CARE, Oxfam and ECB staff, and drew on experience from different agencies’ programmes.
The other successful component of this project was that it not only sought to promote the practice of accountability in emergencies – but accountability was practiced while developing the materials! The collaboration of ECB agencies and consultation with the communities was the key to their success.
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AIM Standing Team 