News archive

Sign up to the ECB e-newsletter

Get our free quarterly email newsletter direct to your inbox.

ECB Project on Twitter

Share and Bookmark

Published on 1 July 2010

Published during Phase I of the ECB project, The Good Enough Guide to Impact Measurement and Accountability in Emergencies is a straightforward, pocket-sized guide that sets out tried and tested methods for putting impact measurement and accountability into practice. The Good Enough Guide (GEG) was written by a team of agency and sector experts who identified the need for a simple guide to the fundamentals of impact measurement and accountability. As part of Phase II of the ECB Project, World Vision, CARE, and Oxfam came together to support the rollout of the guide.

An inter-agency editorial committee formed to develop several materials and tools to clearly communicate the key messages and principles of accountability. The committee consisted of accountability experts from CARE, Oxfam, World Vision, and ECB Project staff. Led by Oxfam, the team began with research into communications tools and trends on how field staff best learn and their communication preferences. Each key message in the GEG was reviewed by the committee and reworded to communicate the key principles to three audiences: disaster affected communities, field staff, and senior management. Armed with this knowledge, the committee set out to develop posters, leaflets and training films to depict the five key messages from the guide. The film includes seven individual training modules that present field and community perspectives on accountability, short examples of best practice implementation, and highlight some of the challenges faced when putting accountability into practice. The film is also available as one long version.

The posters and leaflets were developed in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Kenya, Lebanon, Myanmar, and Peru—a mix of ECB consortia and non-consortia countries. Members of the editorial committee worked with a number of agencies and partners to bring together diverse groups of disaster affected communities, field staff and senior management to gather input and feedback. These groups reviewed the messages, and with a local artist, began developing images to convey these messages. In these sessions, audiences were asked what they understood from these materials, and their perspectives on the rights and responsibilities of communities and NGOs in emergency programs.

The community members themselves were engaged, providing artistic suggestions about what the pictures should look like, what kinds of customs and clothing should be depicted, and how best to communicate the key messages. The images were intended to be contextualized locally, and therefore visually represent the realities of that area, including local dress, housing, cultural norms and featured minimal writing. In Peru, this research work formed an integral part of the launch of a country-wide accountability system within CARE.

In order to test the relevance and quality of the materials they were then field tested. In Bolivia this exercise was carried out during a flood emergency in the Beni region. In Bangladesh and Myanmar, the development and field testing was part of an ongoing emergency response program. Again, three target groups reviewed the images and messages and made suggested revisions. These posters and leaflets are available to download and print in multiple formats by any agency, country office or partner. These materials should form part of an accountability training initiative and can also be used during an emergency response.

Technical guidelines are available in English, French and Spanish to help to replicate, translate and adapt the images for individual country contexts. The print and film materials are available in multiple languages including English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, and Myanmar/Burmese. They can be downloaded for free from here.

A number of launch presentations were recently held within ECB agencies in Canada, Indonesia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The materials have also been shared at external training events such as VOICE’s European-based NGO accountability training. They were also presented to a multi-agency group during the US InterAction 2010 Forum. Preliminary positive feedback from VOICE members, the SPHERE Project, and RedR India confirm their plans to use these materials in their own training programs. Field staff in Bolivia, Bangladesh, Peru and Haiti are also committed to using these materials this year.

Helen Seignior, Accountability Expert at Save the Children, US confirms “These materials provide excellent support for our training of Save the Children national staff here in Haiti. Many staff are new to the organization and also new to the concept of accountability. We also plan to use the videos in our training for program staff.

These materials are also helping us reinforce the message among staff that we can greatly improve the quality of our work and prevent and address exploitation, by enabling beneficiaries to give us feedback easily. We are currently training and supporting staff in Jacmel and Leogane in the implementation of pilot feedback systems in Haiti.”

We will keep you updated on the implementation progress via the website and our forthcoming newsletters, including including news of the ECB Bangladesh consortium’s outputs from jointly developing an accountability training curriculum.

Access all the tools and materials on our Accountability website

Your questions and comments can be sent to us as info@ecbproject.org

 Photo: Faruq Isu, Bangladesh, 2010

Related news