Empowering frontline humanitarian staff to enable the participation of affected people

What are we accepting as participation? A lot of people think that feedback mechanisms are participation, but that has nothing to do with handing over control of the space. It is, in fact, just good programming.

Accountability to affected people (AAP) expert interviewed for the Empower to Enable project

Seven years on from the Grand Bargain commitments and the launch of the Participation Revolution, there has been little meaningful change in the way that aid is designed and delivered. Rather than a fundamental change in the relationship between aid organisations and crisis-affected people, the Participation Revolution has led to a focus on feedback mechanisms and associated tools and policies. While important, this will not deliver the change the sector says it so desperately wants and needs.

As the bridge between a humanitarian organisation and the communities we serve, frontline staff Frontline staff: the humanitarian staff and volunteers who interact directly with clients in the delivery of humanitarian assistance from international and national organisations. play a critical role in enabling the participation of our clients in the design and delivery of humanitarian assistance. Unfortunately, many humanitarian organisations are not empowering their frontline staff to advance client-centred programming.

So what can we do to better engage frontline staff and increase client participation? In order to conclusively answer this question, the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC’s) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance-funded Empower to Enable (E2E) project carried out specific research around this question via a literature review, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions with AAP experts, humanitarian leaders and frontline staff from the IRC and partners in Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This research culminated in the creation of the E2E Learning Report and set the direction for the actionable steps for change in the form of a toolkit.

The E2E Learning Report

The E2E Learning Report identified three enablers of and six barriers to frontline staff’s ability to enable the participation of affected people, as well as three strategic changes that humanitarian organisations can make to better empower frontline staff to improve the participation of affected people. The results are described in more detail in the E2E Learning Report.

What is the role of frontline staff?

Frontline staff play a critical role in enabling the participation of crisis-affected people in the design and delivery of humanitarian assistance, as the group of staff with the most direct day-to-day contact with affected people. More broadly, frontline staff are critical for building trust with crisis-affected people, without which people may not share feedback, engage in projects, or welcome staff into their community.

Frontline staff in humanitarian organisations play a critical role when it comes to:

1. Providing information about the organisation and its programmes to affected populations.
2. Collecting and responding to feedback and answering questions from affected people.
3. Managing expectations of affected people and host communities about the goals and outcomes of a project, as well as the organisation’s capacities.
4. Enabling the participation of crisis-affected people in programme design.
5. Engaging communities in making decisions about the programme during implementation.
6. Implementing safeguarding policies, i.e., prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse.

What enables frontline staff to support participation?

The research makes clear that there are three key enablers that can support frontline staff in supporting the participation of crisis-affected people in the design and delivery of humanitarian assistance. To empower frontline staff and their ability to enable participation, an organisation must ensure that frontline staff have the skills to enable participation. At the most basic level, frontline staff need the knowledge and practical skills (such as soft skills like listening, empathy, facilitation and cultural sensitivity) to implement participatory approaches in their daily work. Integrating these requirements into recruitment and performance appraisals, as well as providing training and coaching, can help strengthen the ability of frontline staff to listen, engage and encourage participation.

Frontline staff must also have clear guidance as to what is expected of them. Humanitarian organisations must provide them with clear expectations in the form of guidance, frameworks, policies, role descriptions, and individual performance objectives, all of which help them to make time for and to see participation as central to their role, rather than an optional add-on.

Lastly, frontline staff must be able to work closely with local partners. When frontline staff are recruited from or work closely with local partners, they have improved access to, acceptance from, and understanding of the local context and community.

What barriers prevent frontline staff from supporting participation?

The E2E Learning Report research also identified six barriers that prevent frontline staff from enabling the participation of crisis-affected people.

1. Participation is not widely understood. Across and within organisations there is no shared understanding of what participation is, what it entails, and why we include it in our work. If the sector does not agree on what constitutes participation, why it is needed, and what changes it requires, it is unlikely that frontline staff will be able to deliver meaningful participation in their day-to-day work.
2. There is limited leadership support and prioritisation. When senior leaders do not see strengthening participation as a priority, then neither do their staff – and even if the staff do, it makes it very difficult for them to drive it forward.
3. Participation is not adequately resourced. When resources, such as funding and materials, are not allocated to frontline staff for participatory activities, it can damage their reputation and acceptance in the community and lead to implementation delays and lower-quality programmes.
4. Frontline staff are not included in decision-making. Frontline staff also tend to be excluded from decision-making processes, making it much less likely that their insights from the regular engagement with crisis-affected people will inform the design and implementation of humanitarian assistance. Given that frontline staff are often the bridge between organisations and communities, their voices and perspectives can be key to ensuring programmes and operations are achievable and responsive to the interests and needs of the population.
5. Frontline staff have too many competing priorities and limited time. Frontline staff are often overwhelmed with many tasks and priorities, and so participation is often neglected.
6. Frontline staff have limited ability to respond to the needs of crisis-affected people. Rigid operations and limited decision-making power means frontline staff are unable to respond to community feedback, which can damage the relationships and levels of trust they have with affected people.

How to empower frontline staff to enable participation

The E2E Learning Report identified three strategic changes that humanitarian organisations can enact to better support their frontline staff to enable the participation of crisis-affected people. The message is clear: on-the-ground change is the only way to unlock the potential of frontline staff to enable the participation of crisis-affected people.

First, humanitarian organisations must systematically engage frontline staff in decision-making. By far, the most common recommendation shared and agreed upon was to ensure frontline staff themselves are connected and engaged in decision-making. As one key informant noted: ‘We need a frontline-centred design approach. We are going to keep falling flat on our face until we change the way we design our programmes.’

Next, organisations have to strengthen the understanding of participation and how to put it into practice. Simplifying and explaining what we mean by participation and accountability in the day-to-day work helps staff to have a clear understanding of what is expected of them throughout the project cycle. Participation must be integrated in the programme design, management tools and processes; one frontline staff member summarised this change well: ‘In the framework of the project cycle, we should be thinking about how to include client input at every step of the cycle.’ The START Network’s guidance on feedback mechanisms recommends making the feedback loop ‘as short as possible’ by empowering frontline staff to ‘make simple changes without extensive consultation’.

And finally, humanitarian organisations have to integrate participation within the organisational culture and strategy. Evidence suggests that integrating accountability commitments and requirements into organisational strategies, policy and standards helps to shift organisational culture to better value participation and to support staff to see participation as an organisation-wide priority. Organisational leadership must make necessary changes to organisational processes – including integrating participation in strategies and plans, and allocating sufficient time, staffing and budget.Internal accountability between leadership and frontline staff leads to a deeper understanding of accountability throughout the organisation. As one IRC staff member explained, this means ‘nurturing a culture of listening to the perspectives of our frontline staff. Not only for big proposals or during design, but as an ongoing process.’

Making the learning report recommendations reality

What should be our priorities for actionable steps toward change?

To transform findings from the learning report into actionable steps toward change, we worked directly with IRC frontline staff in Iraq and DRC, representatives of their local partners, country-programme leadership and AAP experts to identify practical steps for organisations to better engage their frontline staff and thus enable the participation of affected people. Through a series of in-person workshops and a survey of learning report readers, the following priorities were identified as key areas that should and can be addressed through an E2E Toolkit. Of those who participated in the survey, 47% agreed that the most important change that their offices needed to make was to engage frontline staff in organisational decision-making (Figure 1).

In order to better engage frontline staff in decision-making, 49% of respondents agreed that frontline staff should be involved in programme design (Figure 2). Many workshop participants shared anecdotes about the hierarchical and rigid processes around project and proposal design. These included stories about badly designed surveys, visibility materials that were written in the wrong language, and projects that provided the wrong resources – all of which would have been resolved if frontline staff had been consulted during the design process. Frontline staff admitted to having little to no knowledge and involvement in the design of programmes and activities, but all agreed they were interested being involved.

All three factors were equally important to the work of frontline staff in enabling participation. They noted that having Standard Operating Procedures and clear job descriptions helps to dedicate time and available resources to work towards the inclusion of affected people. Participants also agreed that working with local partners enables project implementation to access hard-to-reach areas, build trust and close communication with a community.

The most pervasive barriers were the exclusion of frontline staff from decision-making processes, the lack of resources available to them, and limited support from the organisation’s leadership. Participants shared many examples, including a recent one involving the creation of a survey without consulting frontline staff. When the staff administered it, they found that not only did the length of the survey decrease affected people’s participation, but it was also written in the wrong local language.

What should be included in the E2E Toolkit to avoid duplication of existing work and ‘tools fatigue’?

Co-creating the E2E Toolkit with IRC frontline staff in Iraq and the DRC confirmed that humanitarian professionals at all levels are tired of unwieldy tools and resources that are not directly applicable to their work.

During the workshops, participants were tasked with designing tools that would bring about the strategic changes at their organisations and help empower frontline staff to enable participation of affected people. The participants then selected five tools:

• A ‘leader’s checklist’ for humanitarian leadership at the country programme level, to help them assess whether they are leveraging the enablers identified in the learning report, modelling participatory culture, and identifying areas for improvement.
• Participatory programme design guidance for those leading the design, outlining how to include frontline staff in the design process.
• A list of expectations for frontline staff around what AAP duties they should be carrying out and at what frequency, to be added to their job descriptions and performance evaluations.
• A professional development plan for frontline staff, which matches staff capacities and expected AAP duties with a list of corresponding online resources and open-source training.
• A site visit checklist for country-level leaders and technical sector leads, which would include consultation with the frontline staff and affected people during their visits.

In order to ensure the applicability of the E2E Toolkit, the tools will be tested in a five-month pilot programme in Iraq and the DRC. These country teams will then share feedback on the E2E Toolkit – what is effective, what isn’t, and recommendations for changes to be made. Upon the completion of the pilot programme, the toolkit will be updated based on the feedback and recommendations received. Two case studies will be created and added to the toolkit, based on the IRC staff’s experience in Iraq and DRC during the pilot programme. The final version of the E2E Toolkit will be available by March 2024.

Conclusion and next steps

Seven years on from the original Grand Bargain commitments made in 2016, we must ask ourselves: what action are we going to take to ensure that faster and more sustainable progress on the AAP commitments is made?

Not all findings from the E2E Learning Report can be addressed through a set of tools. Humanitarian leaders must initiate and model changes in their organisational cultures to ensure the participation and experience of frontline staff and crisis-affected people are valued. As this article highlights, facilitating such change starts with how we see, listen to and empower frontline staff. While the E2E Learning Report offers a first look at how to better empower frontline staff, the project aims to turn these findings into action by developing a practical toolkit to support humanitarian organisations in making the recommended changes and creating systems that better empower frontline staff.

If you’re interested in sharing your insights on this topic please take this survey, which will be used to influence the future of the project, or contact the project manager at Leah.Brown@rescue.org.

This work made possible by USAID/BHA, the IRC, and the community.

Leah Brown is the International Rescue Committee (IRC) Client Responsiveness Manager.

Valentina Shafina is the IRC Client Responsiveness Technical Specialist.