Evaluation of Community Feedback in Shaping Humanitarian Response

As humanitarian crises become more prevalent and affect more people, the need to listen and respond to community opinions and concerns is vital. Humanitarian action cannot maximise its effectiveness unless it evolves and adapts its approach to ensure the voices of affected people are heard and their concerns are addressed in a meaningful way.

Initiated in the wake of the 2015 Nepal Earthquake, the work of the Nepal Inter Agency Common Feedback Project (CFP) aimed to support a shift in our way of working by putting people at the centre of humanitarian action. This was done by aggregating and communicating a broad picture of the combines community feedback for humanitarian actors and government on a regular basis.

Pan-response aggregation and dissemination of feedback from crisis affected populations is becoming a global standard, as evidenced by recent attempts at replication of the CFP model in Yemen and South Sudan.

This evaluation has assessed the inputs and outputs of CFP to determine the level of satisfaction of the target audience - humanitarian agencies, clusters, and donors. It also assessed how products developed through the project contributed to the wider framework of analysis and reporting done during the earthquake response.

Most importantly, the evaluation sought to determine how feedback generated through the common feedback project was used by humanitarian agencies, and what barriers existed in preventing use of such data.

Whilst this evaluation is focused on the CFP in Nepal, the findings are relevant in informing and shaping common services for accountability in other contexts.