• The Good Enough Guide
  • View the Good Enough Guide
  • Download PDF
  • Training & Communication Materials
  • Accountability Learning
• Impact Measurement
• Inter-Agency Standing Team
• Joint Evaluations
• Joint Needs Assessment (JNA)

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‘Accountability’ is all about how an organisation balances the needs of different groups in its decision-making and activities. Most NGOs have processes in place that will meet the accountability requirements of more powerful groups such as project donors or host governments. We hope this website and the enclosed communications materials will help you to develop your understanding of Accountability to Beneficiaries in Emergencies and provide you with some simple tools and communications materials that you can use to develop your emergency programs:

• Understand the key principals of accountability to beneficiaries
• Promote the principals of accountability in your communities and with your colleagues
• Train your colleagues and partners
• Improve communication with your communities / beneficiaries by using our materials
• Test the simple Good Enough Guide training tools and communications materials

In The Good Enough Guide, accountability means making sure that the women, men, and children affected by an emergency are involved in planning, implementing, and judging our response to their emergency too. This helps ensure that a project will have the impact they want to see.

The Good Enough Guide was developed by the Emergency Capacity Building Project (ECB). The ECB is a collaborative effort by CARE International, Catholic Relief Services, the International Rescue Committee (Phase I), Mercy Corps, Oxfam GB, Save the Children, and World Vision International. The supporting communications materials were developed in 2009-2010 by the ECB Agencies that form part of Phase II of the ECB project.

What difference are we making?
How do we know?

The Good Enough Guide helps busy field workers to address these questions. It offers a set of basic guidelines on how to be accountable to local people and measure programme impact in emergency situations.

Its ‘good enough’ approach emphasises simple and practical solutions and encourages the user to choose tools that are safe, quick, and easy to implement. It is aimed at humanitarian practitioners, project officers and managers with some experience in the field, and draws on the work of field staff, NGOs, and inter-agency initiatives.

Photo caption: The ECB Accountability project team test field-staff accountability materials with Oxfam, and partner field staff, in Cyclone Aila affected communities in southern coastal regions, Bangladesh. Faruq Isu, Bangladesh, 2010