Lessons learned during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic: localisation is the key to programme adaptation during shocks

What do armed conflicts, natural disasters and extreme weather events have in common? They are all shocks that can limit physical access to people in need, which can make it increasingly difficult for humanitarian practitioners to continue their work, including their community-engagement activities. The Covid-19 pandemic, and its accompanying policies and restrictions, created similar access challenges for humanitarian organisations, especially those implementing programmes requiring face-to-face interaction. During the pandemic, Mercy Corps, like many other organisations, was compelled to find new and creative solutions to reach participants.

But how did Mercy Corps programme teams adapt their work, especially programmes requiring the active involvement of individuals or groups? Could these adaptations be used by other humanitarian practitioners in the face of future shocks that limit access to communities? To help answer these questions, we conducted a research study called Participatory Adaptations in the COVID-19 Era (PACE). Through interviews with colleagues from 15 global Mercy Corps programmes, PACE investigated how these programmes adapted their activities between March 2020 and December 2022.

Centring local leadership before a shock can unlock adaptive capacities

A first key finding is that intentionally centring the voices and agency of communities and actors before Covid-19 struck was a core factor that enabled programmes to adapt to new risks and constraints. Specifically, CATALYSE – Mercy Corps’ community mobilisation approach – played a key role in helping guide teams in centring local priorities within their programmes. This proactive, locally led approach helped make the programme adaptations during the pandemic possible by establishing a culture of participation, local ownership, and mutual respect and trust. One way Mercy Corps programmes did this was by utilising preexisting community structures or committees in their activities, as opposed to establishing new ones. Additionally, programmes ensured that their activities were not extractive but reciprocal, based on mutual and transparent communication between the teams and communities. This included the involvement of local partners and communities in discussions about programme designs and security.

Incorporating local leadership into programmes from the start created an enabling environment within communities that centred around a culture of trust and mutual respect, and positively positioned Mercy Corps programmes for adaptations once the ripple effects of Covid-19 began to spread.

In our research, we identified the following four specific adaptations used by Mercy Corps programmes during Covid, which could be applied in response to other types of shocks, both natural and man-made. While these adaptations were enabled by pre-existing norms and behaviours that supported local leadership, each of these adaptations in many cases created positive feedback loops that further deepened localisation.

Community representatives can bridge the access gap

The first adaptation was elevating committee representatives as liaisons so that programme activities could continue even when teams could not access communities. Peacebuilding and development programmes in general often involve committee structures within their activities, making them a valuable resource when considering programme adaptations. For the Mercy Corps programmes in PACE, the programmes selected committee members from preexisting community structures, which led to heightened levels of local ownership of the programme and a culture of participation. A colleague from Nigeria explains this culture of participation and trust here:

We called them [committee representatives] to ask, “Is there anything that you need us to improve on in our programming?” We had their trust, and they knew that we were doing the right thing and standing for their interests.

Due to these enabling factors that valued localisation, programmes could more easily adapt by elevating committee representatives as liaisons in response to the pandemic.

Likely benefits of this adaptation include strengthening community resilience and enabling the liaisons to provide sustained coaching and mentorship to other community members, even after the programmes end. Despite these potential benefits, unintended consequences also occurred. Specifically, this adaptation led to reduced diversity in programme participants, especially when existing community leaders – who in many cases were men – were designated as the liaisons. Our colleagues in Burkina Faso experienced this when they decided to communicate directly with predominantly adult male community leaders or local authorities who were members of the village assemblies, with the expectation that these leaders would communicate the information to the wider assembly. However, this inadvertently reinforced existing power dynamics. Future applications of this adaptation in response to conflicts or natural disasters should more deliberately select diverse committee representatives as liaisons in order to ensure the inclusion and representation of different segments of the community.

Additionally, this adaptation at times led to inconsistencies in programme implementation for Mercy Corps teams, including differences in messaging and interpretations of messaging by communities. Our colleague in Niger explains this:

We weren’t always sure if they [liaisons] faithfully transmitted the messages about social cohesion and tools we gave them, but instead, each person had their own interpretation and passed the message according to their own manner.

To better support committee structures and liaisons when responding to other kinds of shock, collaboration with a diverse network of local actors – such as institutions, academics, businesses, government agencies, and faith leaders – should be incorporated into programme efforts so they can serve as technical resources during times of crises.

Local practitioners should lead the way

The second main adaptation Mercy Corps teams implemented during Covid was empowering local practitioners with greater authority to co-design, implement and adapt programmes. The programmes ensured that their activities from the start were reciprocal, based on mutual and transparent communication, and not extractive. For example, with a programme in Nigeria, strategic decisions related to programme expansion, security or funding were shared openly with all of the partners so they could better orient their contributions and activities. Such initial steps for mutual respect and trust enabled these programmes to empower local practitioners even further during programme adaptations resulting from the pandemic. The practitioners identified for this adaptation – especially civil society organisations or community mobilisers – were primarily from and physically based in the target communities. For our colleagues in Niger and Nigeria, for example, programme teams at times relied on community mobilisers, who were already engaged in Mercy Corps programmes even before the pandemic, for implementation and information sharing when access to communities became restricted. As stated by a colleague in Iraq, ‘You don’t need access if someone is already there.’

Unlike outside actors, local practitioners have a unique proximity to and local knowledge of the communities. This ultimately enabled Mercy Corps programmes to more easily tailor their activities to local contexts and to resume their activities more quickly as Covid lockdowns eased. Capacity-strengthening for the local practitioners and virtual programme management tools supporting the partnership between Mercy Corps and local practitioners helped enable the implementation of this adaptation, particularly collaborative capacity-building efforts. As explained by a colleague in Nigeria:

Tools were not developed exclusively by Mercy Corps staff, but collaboratively with partners. All of the partners were called to review the tools to see whether there were things to change so that they were fully adapted to the local context… Partners were given flexibility to innovate, if what was collectively developed for the overall project was found not to work in the specific localities.

Empowering local practitioners in this way can lead to greater community participation in programme activities since community members witness local experts directly contributing to the programme design and development.

Despite the tremendous contributions by local practitioners, these added responsibilities can take a toll on them as well. Mercy Corps colleagues found that at times this adaptation led local practitioners to experience added stress, including pressure to deliver activities in uncertain contexts and tensions with other programme participants from the community. A colleague in Syria experienced this additional stress, especially during the early days of Covid when he felt an expectation to keep the programme operational at the same level by meeting the same targets within the pre-Covid same deadlines, despite the unfamiliar and changing context of the pandemic. To avoid such stress in response to future shocks, such as extreme weather events and natural disasters, programme designs should more actively map out the existing community capacities and resources, such as local associations or venue spaces, that could provide additional support during programme adaptations.

Adjust technological adaptations to the specific digital context

Organisations commonly utilise digital solutions in situations that restrict access, and Mercy Corps is no exception. Mercy Corps deployed technological solutions during Covid-19 that included low-tech solutions like radio broadcasts and hybrid solutions that blended virtual spaces with in-person engagement. These digital adaptations helped increase the number of participants, including women and youth, and saved programmes time and resources previously devoted to travel and venue expenses. A colleague in Iraq explained that ‘with Skype, the majority of participants could attend the sessions with the click of a button.’

However, not all programme activities can easily be transferred to a digital setting. Mercy Corps teams found that in-person activities seeking to strengthen skills, nurture relationships, promote collaborative decision-making or resolve disputes rarely translated well to digital spaces. This could potentially lead to lower than desired gains in social cohesion and knowledge acquisition. Colleagues in Haiti anticipated this challenge and deliberately adapted their training and facilitation approaches for a digital conference-call format. This involved reworking the training manual so that less content was delivered at each session, and the creation and distribution of workbooks for participants to follow along with during the calls.

Despite such anticipatory efforts, the digital divide can still create significant challenges for any organisation that aims to deploy digital adaptations. For Mercy Corps programmes, the severity of the digital divide in certain contexts undermined specific programme goals, such as inclusion. In some cases, Mercy Corps programme teams deemed the divide too grave for digital tools, particularly in remote and underdeveloped areas of Burkina Faso, Uganda and Syria. To strengthen future uses of digital adaptations in other types of crises, more investment should be made into digital literacy efforts, both for staff and participants, and into the development of adaptation options that include low-tech and hybrid approaches, in order to ensure the diversity and inclusion of as many participants as possible.

Activities should adapt to meet new community needs

In times of crises, while maintaining existing programme activities is often a top concern, organisations should also be flexible to adapt activities in response to community needs that emerge following a shock. Mercy Corps teams did this by adjusting the focus of programme activities to address emergent needs from the Covid-19 crisis. Through the programmes’ established culture of participation and local ownership, centring community voices and conducting thorough and robust context analyses enabled Mercy Corps teams to identify these emergent needs and formulate locally led solutions.

These efforts demonstrate the communities’ resilience through collective action and decision-making. For example, a youth violence-prevention programme in Haiti used research studies to identify that intercommunal tensions were increasing during Covid-19, as explained by a colleague in the country:

This research really helped us to adapt our activities in relation to Covid, because already, we had a clear idea of how the people would perceive the pandemic, how we could approach it, and make adaptations.

This led the programme to add modules on dispute resolution into their planned life-skills training for adolescents. Specifically, modules on personal leadership were adapted to sensitise the participants on community conflicts resulting from the pandemic and strategies for de-escalating such conflicts, which helped to prevent tensions from escalating to violence.

Despite the benefits of this type of adaptation, disinformation and misinformation were a barrier at times to meaningful community engagement and context analysis, as explained by a colleague in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): ‘Once Covid came, they [the communities] felt that this is something crazy, this is something created by the humanitarians, just to continue working in DRC, just to continue getting money.’ While such beliefs made it incredibly challenging to address public health emergencies in a direct way, credible community leaders were important and effective messengers who could combat these rumours.

Conclusion

Overall, our findings from the PACE research demonstrate that while investing in the agency of communities and local practitioners is a core element of advancing localisation commitments, it also builds key resilience capabilities that can be deployed in future shocks. This investment requires fostering community leadership throughout a programme’s life cycle, utilising existing structures to ensure programme integration within local contexts, and engaging a diverse network of local actors for robust community support. The experiences from Mercy Corps teams throughout the Covid-19 era, therefore, demonstrate the importance of weaving participatory and adaptive approaches into programme activities before shocks occur, and then deepening and maintaining them while adapting and recovering. Our colleague in Nigeria could not have put it better: ‘Because we were deliberate from the start about community participation, that helped us in more fully transitioning the power to the community during Covid.’

While humanitarians cannot predict the nature or timing of the next emergency, proactively incorporating these Covid-era lessons on centring community participation will better prepare us for inclusive adaptations to new complex crises that come our way.

Bharathi Radhakrishnan, PhD is a Researcher for Peace, Conflict, and Governance at Mercy Corps

Ryan Sheely, PhD is Senior Managing Director for Research, Evidence and Learning at Mercy Corps