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Aid workers are trying to communicate better with the people they serve, but they often don't act on what they hear
Ask children who've lived through an earthquake to draw what scares them, and most psychologists would expect to see pictures of flattened houses or lost relatives.
Not so in one of Haiti's biggest homeless camps.
"What they got, overwhelmingly, was drawings of pigs. It turned out what children were really frightened about were the pigs people had running around," said Imogen Wall, who helped set up the CDAC network, which aims to improve communications between aid workers, local authorities and the people they serve.
"So actually, if you wanted to make the kids feel better in the camp, you didn't provide them with child psychologists ... you put up fences to keep the pigs out, which is what they did."
Wall related this anecdote at a discussion in London this week, to illustrate the way many Western aid agencies so easily make assumptions about what's going on after a disaster when all it takes to be sure is a conversation.
Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) was started two years ago in a bid to address the aid community's failure by and large to talk and listen to people caught up in disasters.
"This is entirely separate from how aid agencies normally think about communications, which is public information, press releases, it's interviews to the media, it's fundraising essentially," Wall said.
CDAC, which includes experts in radio, mass media, text messaging (SMS) and web-based communications, cut its teeth in Haiti. Not only did it provide a daily humanitarian news bulletin which was broadcast on 40 local radio stations via media development group Internews, it also used SMS to send out information about food distributions, health services and cash-for-work programmes.
When the World Food Programme (WFP) wanted to introduce a voucher system, the U.N. aid agency used radio and SMS to explain what the vouchers were, how and where to get them, who was eligible and how to recognise forgeries. Once the vouchers began circulating, Internews journalists reported on what was working and what wasn't.
Which is a start.
MISSING THE POINT
Despite a plethora of initiatives on "doing better with affected populations" which have sprung up over the years - from the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership to the ECB Accountability and Impact Measurement - aid workers still appear to find it hard to talk to their clients, who they often call beneficiaries.
Many may have forgotten or have yet to learn the value of sitting down and chatting to communities, and sharing tea and ideas with national colleagues.
"We had time to talk to people (before)," said Wall's fellow panellist Francois Grunewald, chairman of France-based research body, Groupe URD.
"We were not in a hurry to come back from field work because we were not so much under pressure by donors to write reports, we had no sitrep (situation report) to write every day."
When his team first arrived in early February 2010 to assess the aftermath of Haiti's devastating quake, "we were totally stunned by not only the scale of the disaster but by the fact there was so little communication between the aid sector and the population," Grunewald said.
Aid workers, he pointed out, were for weeks "kept hostage" in the U.N. logistics base - where they had little or no contact with ordinary Haitians - because of "the perception or fantasy of insecurity". Not only were they physically isolated from these communities, but many couldn't speak French or Creole.
Not talking to Haitians meant few understood that the residents of the capital Port-au-Prince were sleeping in open spaces to feel safe from the aftershocks but that "all the life was in the neighbourhoods", Grunewald said.
"The aid system arrived in Haiti with this narrative of camp response, IDP (internally displaced people) response, refugee response ... until quite recently, the aid system didn't take into account the fact that we were in an urban context," he added. "One of the reasons we missed that point was because we didn't talk enough."
He also criticised the humanitarian community's tendency to become "extra technical", focusing on quantifiable targets such as the litres of water delivered and the number of tents distributed.
"If we get too technical ... we lose the human part of humanitarian aid," Grunewald said.
ACTING ON INFORMATION
In her assessment, Wall said there were two areas where CDAC failed in Haiti: working with church groups, which alongside radio were considered the most trusted source of information, particularly with women; and incorporating feedback in a more systematic way.
"Talking's easy, listening's a lot harder. There was a lot of data (with SMS) that we didn't try to iterate back into the decision-making process. That's the question: how do you get the voices of affected populations into the decision-making process?" she said.
She ended with another anecdote, this time about the cholera outbreak in Haiti which came to light in October.
Haitian mobile phone operator Digicel, together with researchers at a U.S. university, analysed the movement of people in and out of the town of Saint Marc, near the epicentre of the epidemic, four months before it began, using patterns of phone usage.
"From the point of view of looking at predictions of the next outbreak of cholera - that stuff was gold. I had that emailed to me in Haiti by at least four different people ... saying something along the lines of 'oh, this is really interesting', and then no one did anything with it," Wall said.
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