3. The Customer is King

Every single humanitarian I know agrees that we must become more accountable and more responsive to the populations we serve. The issue of accountability to affected populations has been a central theme for the sector for years. It was central in the 2O16 World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, it features centrally in the Grand Bargain that came out of that summit. Over the past years massive investments have been made in this area. Staff has been hired, frameworks and guidelines have been set up, complaints mechanisms are established in most major operations today, and so the million dollar question is, has it made a difference? Are we actually getting better at listening to our customers and are our customers happier? One of the best persons to answer those questions is Nick van Praag. Nick started Ground Truth Solutions in 2O12, and since then, that organisation has published perception surveys providing a feedback loop for humanitarian actors. I sit down with Nick to discuss where are we today? Do you see progress? And where are we going in the future? I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Nick from Prague, welcome to Trumanitarian.

Thanks. Great to be here.

You're best known as the founder of Ground Truth Solutions that has done excellent work over the past eight years. Why don't we begin by you telling us a bit about what is Ground Truth Solutions and what is it that you do?

Ground Truth Solutions is part of the sort of accountability architecture, if you like, in the humanitarian space. And when we were established, the idea was to try and bring the perspective of people affected by humanitarian crisis to the fore in the way programmes are designed and how they're implemented. It sounds like quite an obvious thing to do, but it's not something that takes place on a regular basis, even today. Our goal was to try and find a practical means to do that. And our sense was the fact that there wasn't some kind of a mechanism that allowed that to happen in a fairly pain free way for the organisations running the programmes, meant that it wasn't happening as it ought to. I should just add that we also saw accountability to affected people as a lever to bring about change in the humanitarian system. We felt that if one could hear the perspective of people who were supposed to benefit from humanitarian action, and one responded to it, then programming would be more effective, it will be more efficient, it would be able to provide greater value for money, it would it would begin to shift the way the system operated.

Maybe walk us through concretely what it is you do. So let's take a context that you have worked in. How do you come in? And what what do you actually do?

What we do is work either with individual organisations, helping them develop the capacity to elicit feedback from people who are affected by crises, to analyse that feedback, to relate it to the programmes that they either have in place or plan to put in place, and to get back to the communities they gather the feedback from, tell them what they've learned, indicate how they might be able to improve things so that their views improve, their perspective of the performance of the organisations improved, and then for those organisations to undertake course corrections, and then to go back to the same communities, and continue to ask them questions over a period of time so you get trend data, and you're able to work out whether the actions that are being taken are actually making a difference. We worked a lot with individual organisations at the very beginning. Now most of our work is at the collective level, looking at how effectively the overarching response is working. And to do that in the same way. To take a representative sample across a humanitarian response. Track the way they see that response and work with organisations responsible for its implementation to respond and become more responsive as a result as organisations to the views and needs of the people they set out to help.

So if I hear you correctly, your theory of change is, we go out and ask people what they actually think. We then make that data available to the humanitarian community, and therefore they change their behaviour and we get a more adaptive, more appropriate response. Is that a fair recap?

I think that's a fair recap of where we were at the very beginning. Our theory of change is exactly that. You gather the data, organisations are having trouble doing that, we'll do it for them, they will then see the light, and they will respond to it. And it would trigger action on its own. This feedback would trigger action of itself. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. And people thought it was interesting, but didn't necessarily take it into account in the way they took decisions.

So how did you pick up that it didn't change anything? What showed you that nothing was changing?

We have a mechanism built into what we do, which gives us pretty clear insight as to whether anything is changing, because we go back to the communities and ask them very similar questions, or the same questions in many instances, so we can track, over time, the trend data, and see whether people feel better informed, whether they sense that their ability to participate in decision making is improving, whether they know about complaint mechanisms and are willing to use them, whether they feel more empowered, whether life is getting better or worse. So we can track these things and our sense was, based on our initial interventions, that actually not much was changing over time. And so then we began to think well, what else can we do? So we thought, what we need to do is we need to visualise the data in more compelling terms, we need to develop a narrative that seizes the reader in a way that they engage with the data and start to make changes. And that had a sort of moderate success... was a sort of move away from a kind of dry statistical approach. But we then began to sort of work with donors and push them to require their grantees to both demonstrate that they seek out the perspective of effective people and use it one thing is to seek out the perspective and the other thing is actually to do something about it. Donors are the market, as you know, for humanitarian services, they are the people who pay the pay for humanitarian action. And generally, organisations pay attention to their demands.

So the evolution you describe is basically from from data collection, to reflecting on visualisation (how easy it is to use your, your products). to then more of an advocacy role in front of the donor saying, Hey, we need to change this.

Exactly. So then we... I mean, these, as I say, these are... people who are running humanitarian programmes tend to listen to donors, because they're the ones who provide the wherewithal for them to be able to continue their activities.

But will they continue to listen to you and work with you, if you... if they know you engage with the donors and go tell them what's happening.

Our experience has been that they do continue to engage with us. And I think that the kinds of requirements that donors have placed have been useful in keeping these issues to the fore and the... sort of the paramountcy of being accountable to affected people. The problem is that the kind of response from a lot of humanitarian actors has been to put in place kind of accountability frameworks and gadgets of that kind, which actually don't lead to real change on the ground. And again, the ability of some kind of supply side accountability framework to actually make a difference in the lives of people is not assured.

So you said you started adopting at... Sorry. You started adapting your theory of change, when you saw a flatline in terms of the trends. Is that different now? So the... In other words, the things you've learned and the way you change your work, is that giving you a better result? Can you actually pick that up in the data?

Yeah, I mean, we've seen in certain instances, changes taking place as a result of organisations taking the feedback and acting upon it. I'll give you an example. We did some work a few months ago in northeast Nigeria, with the cash consortium there, and I think was something like 89% of people who were potential recipients of cash, didn't understand how the selection process worked. And the people who ran... who run that cash programme were obviously a little concerned by this and they have now redoubled their efforts to make sure that people understand more clearly what the selection criteria are. And in our subsequent... in our next round of data collection, we'll see whether or not they do feel indeed better informed about the way that works.

But if I can challenge you. So AAP, Accountability to Affected Populations, has been very high on the policy agenda since... basically since the World Humanitarian Summit and the Grand Bargain. A lot of effort has gone into it. What have we achieved? If you had to just, in two or three points recap, what has been achieved with all the work that has gone into this area for the past years? What would you say they are?

Well, I guess the first thing I would say is that there is a recognition that it's really important to be accountable to people. So that's the sort of... the acceptance of that is really important. And I don't think that's going to let up anytime soon. And there is a recognition that while, on the rhetorical level, one's made progress, operationally, it hasn't really gotten traction yet. So I think that that's, you know, at once a sort of a good development, but the, you know, the limitations of that development are pretty clear. So I think that's important. I think there's a much greater effort on the part of organisations such as Ground Truth Solutions to work with others in the accountability space. And of course, we're not alone. There are many other organisations who are pushing for greater accountability, both independent organisations like ours, but also people who have accountability in their job title within organisations. And I think there's a sort of potential there for these organisations... these individuals and organisations to come together. I think we've seen a lot of progress on the communicating with communities front, recognition that people above all else, almost, need to understand what is being done on their behalf and how they can access services that are being provided in the context of humanitarian emergencies. So I think there's... they're these coalition's of action which are establishing themselves. There's a great deal more resources being put into it. I think donors are really keen to see further movement on this. So I think, you know, we haven't, you know, shifted the needle to the other side of the dial yet, but we've got some of the building blocks in place. And I guess that's a good thing. The important thing to do now is having established a bridgehead, to continue, and really push this agenda forward.

So how do we make a transformational? How do we make sure that in our business the customer is king?

it's extremely hard. The humanitarian system is kind of messy, it's loosely controlled, it's full of diverse actors with individual agendas and many degrees of freedom to do what they want. So the idea of holding that kind of rabble accountable is extremely difficult. And I don't think we found the holy grail yet. But I think we are making progress. One of the things that we are most excited about, is to try and link people's perceptions of humanitarian action with the objectives that the humanitarian actors have set themselves. Remember, when we began working in Chad, about three years ago, the Swedish government who supported our work there, collecting feedback from affected people in that country, said, you know, The only way you're going to be able to make a difference is to embed yourself in the architecture of the response. And what they meant by the architecture of response was sort of find a docking station within the system which will allow you to transmit and translate the data that you acquire and the analysis that you put behind it into the system. But in fact, that's not enough. And what we've discovered in Chad (and we've now replicated this in a number of other humanitarian responses), is to work with the humanitarian country team and develop metrics around people's perceptions of the success that the humanitarian actors are having realising their goals. And if... And that really is embedding people's perceptions and people's perspective in the architecture of the system. Because it's not a nice to have, it's something that the humanitarian actors actually need to be able to demonstrate that they're making a difference. Again, there's a tendency there to pick indicators that are perhaps easier to... and targets that are easier to to meet. And one has to be very careful that accountability to affected people doesn't just boil down to, Are people properly informed? Do they know how to make complaints? The kind of lump and form of accountability. What we need is to make sure that refugees, displaced people, others affected by crisis, actually... their perspective is actually sought and valued in relation to every aspect of the response. And there's a real danger, that one reduces it to some kind of de minimus approach to accountability, which won't make a difference.

This very, sort of, consulting engaging approach you have with the internal country team, going and working technically with them, getting better indicators, really helping the system as such to perform better in this area, do you sometimes think that maybe you will have more of an impact if you were more independent? If you were simply 'Grounded Truth with no Borders' sort of an approach, coming out and just shining lights of things independently of what the main operational access was saying.

You know, I didn't think we operate in a vacuum. There's no way we can make the system more accountable. We're just one player, quite a small player, with important allies. And we can't make the difference on our own. The only way that we will make a difference is if we provide a service (I don't want to send some servile)... a service which is provided independently. We can we can give an opportunity to organisations running humanitarian programmes to understand how people see things. We're not NGO X or UN organisation Y going to ask people how well they're doing, because that will not give you very candid responses and candour is absolutely essential in this field. We are independent, but we do need to work with the organisations who are running these programmes because it's they who need to make the changes to their programmes, if the perspective that we bring to the surface is going to make a difference.

So for the past eight years, you've been an independent entrepreneur. You built this organisation. How many people are you now?

About 25.

And a turnover of?

Of 2.5 million euro a year.

And you used to work with some of the really big organisations in this industry, right: with the UNHCR, with the World Bank, and so on. How has that been, that shift? How has it helped you build up Ground Truth that you had this extensive network and understanding of the mainstream humanitarian organisations? And how is it different now working in this small outfit?

Well, it's actually great working for a small organisation. I wish I'd done that. Sometime back, I spent, I don't know, 35 years working for large international organisations, which was also great. And I made many friends and I learned an enormous amount. And I think one of the assets that I bring to this small organisation is the fact that you know, people who are engaged in these activities. I also understand the frustrations that they face in doing what they would like to be doing. And I know how much time is taken up with the sort of bureaucratic pursuits when people would be prefer, much prefer, to be getting on with the dealing with the realities on the ground. So I kind of understand the perspective of practitioners in both the development and the humanitarian spaces. And so I have an enormous, you know, I have enormous sympathy for the predicament that they face. I also recognise that these people who work in these organisations need the sort of pressure that organisations like mine, and like ACAPS, and like many others in our space, can provide. And it sort of takes a family, as Hillary Clinton said in the title of her book many years ago, it takes many players, to make a difference. And certainly, accountability to affected people is not a solo act, you need many players to come together to make a difference. And I think that having had that experience, working for these large organisations has really helped me understand what a challenge that is. And it's also persuaded me that perhaps the single most effective lever is to bring this perspective of the people into the equation and use that as a lever, not not a battering ram, but as a lever. And that's what we are trying to do.

When you work with information provision, sometimes it... your impact is through the agency of others. So if decision makers behave differently, you have had an impact if they don't change anything, nothing happens. That can be an incredibly difficult situation to be in as an organisation because you don't have clear metrics of the impact. Could you just talk us through how do you and your colleagues think about impact and and when do you know that you're getting there and what are you just wondering about in terms of Are we making a difference at all?

Well, I think, you know, one can look at it in different way. One can look at, you know, the amount of attention that's paid to issues related to participation now across the humanitarian space. So there is clearly a recognition that this is an important area. And that, I think, is sort of... you can verify that in speeches made by, you know, heads of organisations in, you know, foreign ministers, discourses around the General Assembly and so on.

Absolutely. We know we have a problem. But does that change the reality of crisis-affected populations?

Does it change the reality? I would say, to rarely, to be very honest about it. It's way too easy, still, to ignore this perspective and... the one that we bring, and to make all kinds of excuses as to why it's very difficult to do that in the fog of humanitarian action, and that there are many reasons why you cannot do things. There are also a lot of reasons why you can. And I think that's a really, you know, important recognition. And, I mean, we can measure whether or not organisations are taking action. As I was saying earlier, we track people's perceptions over time and that trend data is extremely revealing as to whether anything is happening. But, you know, by the same token, how one actually, you know... so we have a metric, it's in our faces all the time. Every round of data we collect gives us a sense of whether or not what we're doing is making a difference. But it makes me... I mean, it's extremely... a small organisation, along with other people who work on accountability issues, cannot be held responsible. And this is something that I find quite challenging, actually, which is that, you know, people are always saying, Well, what difference does it may be what you're doing? Are people, you know, are people responding to the data? As if it was my fault they're not responding to the data. Of course, I have a responsibility to try and do my utmost to bring this perspective to bear, to provide the analysis in context, and to work with organisations to help them think through what needs to change if people's perceptions are to improve over time, in the context of what those organisations are trying to achieve. And so I can do all of those things, as I was describing earlier, but I cannot... I think it makes little sense to hold accountability people responsible for whether or not the system is becoming accountable. They are bit players in a much larger drama.

So how do we fix the big drama?

The big drama is complex and I don't think there are any easy solutions. I think that what we need to see is much greater scrutiny on the part of the donors of what is being done with their resources and in their name, because these are the organisations for the most part... These are the... the donors are the people... they represent the entities that govern these organisations. And they need to get much more real about demanding effective action. I'll give you an example. Humanitarian endeavour at the response level, Somalia, Democratic Republic, Congo, Uganda, wherever else, Myanmar, there's a humanitarian response plan. Every year, there's a humanitarian response plan, where the entire humanitarian community comes together to look at what the needs are and what they're going to do about meeting them and they formulate a plan and then they execute it. But these plans are never evaluated. The objectives they set themselves are never scrutinised. There's no independent verification as to whether anything's happened. By the end of the year long cycle, which by the way, isn't enough to achieve anything in these very long (drawn out, for the most part) crises. But by the time that yearly cycle has come to an end, everybody involved in planning and implementation of humanitarian action is busy developing the next year's plan. And what we need to do is to, first of all, extend the period of the planning cycles so that you give organisations some time to really achieve something and to respond to the kind of feedback we and others can provide. But you also need to get serious about saying, Well, you said you were going to ach-... you know, you were going to achieve a, b and c. You know, why did you? And if you did, great. if you didn't, why not? And what could we all do to improve the chances of that happening? So I think that, you know, there's an enormous amount that needs to be done, but it really comes down to this famous concept of incentives and the moment the incentives are not tremendously focused on making sure that organisations do the best possible job.

And what I hear you're saying is that you see the donors as the main agents that can change that?

I think the donors have a, you know, preponderant role in the humanitarian system. And they're not that many of them. They tend to be sort of Western, including, of course, Japan and Australia. Countries of fairly like minded, or traditionally had been fairly like minded... so one would see the opportunity there of them coming together behind some of these approaches, and really enforcing it. It would be great if more countries were involved, if the donor base was enlarged for international action, because there's a lot of money being spent by individual countries at the national level, I didn't want to play that down. But you know, if those countries could come together, and really enforce an approach that placed a premium on responding to the views of affected people, and making sure that they were doing their utmost to meet their demands and their requirements, that will go a very long way. I think most international organisations, whether they're UN or NGOs, you know, talk a good line on this and they would, you know, clearly, I think, appreciate being prodded into doing more, but so long as organisations aren't obliged to do it, there are many complications related to humanitarian action, and they will take the easy road rather than the high road. And I think the donors are... really, they have a very important role to play in making sure they take the right fork in the road and head up rather than down.

Let me make the counter argument. It's incredibly difficult to work in these contexts we're working. We, as humanitarian organisations, don't have a lot of control. Your data, quite frankly, isn't strong enough to really be used for decision making so I find it very troubling that you sit here and advocate that the donor should punish us because of whatever your data says. How do you respond to that?

That's actually not what I'm saying. Because the data that we collect is just an instrument. In fact, collecting data is the relatively easy part of what we do. It's the basis for a conversation. And, you know, when you undertake surveys, you always get stuff there, when you read through the tea leaves, you don't really understand. And the crucial thing is to use this feedback, not as an absolute metric that is going to determine what it is that you or others do next, it's about actually coming together with the organizaion's, talking through what that data says, trying to understand from their perspective, why people see things the way they do. And then going back also to the communities where the data comes from, and saying, 'Look, this is what we learned. Did we learn that right? This is what we plan to do. Might this make a difference?' It's about a process. And it needs to be an iterative process. It's not a one-off thing. It's not like doing one survey, you know, once in a while. It's about actually engaging. And if one does that, the data can trigger that process. But it shouldn't be the basis for decisions being taken.

So where would you say that the sort of system you have... You describe now with collection of data, good conversation, both with the communities and organisations, and you do that over time. Where do you think... Where do you see that working best today? Where... What's your success case?

I think it's interesting... In the context of COVID, we've been collecting quite a lot of data looking at the perspective of people who are affected by preexisting humanitarian crisis in this new and complicating crisis. And there, I think there's a real desire... We're seeing it in Syria, for instance, one of the more difficult contexts... There's a real appetite on behalf of the leadership of the humanitarian response operating out of Gaziantep to understand the perspective of people inside Syria who are affected by, you know, everything that that can be thrown at them, almost literally, and have engaged... through sort of community focal points, have engaged to kind of think through the data that we're bringing back from Syria, and see how they can respond to it. So I think there are many points of light. And there's a tonne of enthusiasm to take this stuff forward. But there's also a real danger that in the context of COVID with access challenges, how do you actually go out and meet with these people? Which is how you... We traditionally collect data face to face. Now we're having to do it remotely, it's kind of complicated. With the kind of financial challenges the humanitarian system is facing, the general sort of confusion of this kind of period in our history, there's a real danger now that we we don't treat COVID as a challenge, but we use this as an excuse not to interact with communities, not to do the due diligence as far as community engagement is concerned. And that is something that really, really worries me. That the progress that we've made over the past few years may be lost if we just sort of go back to business as usual because of the complications of the environment in which we operate.

So are you worried that diminishing funding will hit you hard? Are you worried that Ground Truth Solution will be seen as quote unquote a luxury in a time with more constrained budget? Or... How do you think about that?

That's not actually something we're seeing in terms of support for our own activities. On the contrary, we've had a lot of interest from some some really engaged donors to... for us to carry our work forward, which is really encouraging. The bind comes at the level of translating that donor created momentum into action on the ground. And I just hope that what we see in the current cycle, where at the moment, the humanitarian community is gearing up to design humanitarian response plans for nine... for 2O21. And my hope is that these planning processes and the plans that emerge will place a significant emphasis on the way ordinary people live the humanitarian experience. And it'll be... you know, there will be pressure to push back. And hopefully, the support that we're getting from donors will enable us at least to play our role in that process.

You mentioned Syria as an example. And if I understood you correctly, you're saying it works because there's a lot of commitment from the humanitarian country team. So you have champions in Gaziantep. Is that the key difference between context? Is that having that champion? Is it individuals driving this across the globe? Or to what extent is it beginning to become institutionalised, if you want?

I think that what we're seeing is that organisations in this very loosen sort of system of humanitarian players, there are certain behaviours that people adopt because they see other people doing it. There's a kind of... I wouldn't call it a herd mentality, but there's a sort of very healthy approach to seeing what good practice looks like, and trying to do something about it. I think actually, UNOCHA has brought together a group of what they consider to be some of the more progressive country teams and tried to work with them to ensure that they do these kinds of things. And I think that the champions within the system are extremely important. And it's really important that they are given the incentives that will then incentivate... will incentivize others to follow suit. So it's really important that you have this sort of "tache d'huile" or whatever it is, this oil slick phenomenon. You have centres of excellence, and then behaviours emerge from those centres of excellence and become adopted practice across the system, hopefully, over time. Big Question is, how long will that take?

And as that community of champions evolve and grow and has more impact, how does that change the role of Ground Truth Solutions? Will you continue to be there in the field collecting data? Is that your long term role? What do you see yourself doing in five years?

I think we don't... I mean, I don't see Ground Truth becoming a sort of behemothic humanitarian organisation. We are not driven by growth. That's not our goal. Our goal is to try and change the humanitarian system and to help it to become more effective, more efficient, and so forth, and so on. And more responsive, I think that's the key word. And I don't think that's something that will happen by us getting bigger and bigger and doing more surveys in country after country after country. I think what our role has to be is to prove the concept, is to demonstrate how this can be done, to help organisations enhance their own capacity so they can do it themselves. Organisations at the country level can provide independent verification as to the way people see things. And we should then move on to other things. I don't see ourselves, you know, becoming rooted in this practice. I would love us to be able to pass on our experience and our methodology to others and then and then experiment at the margins of what we're doing and sort of begin to do other things.

Give us give us a flavour of those other things.

Maybe a last question for, Nick. So you've done all this great work. And I am such a fan of Ground Truth Solutions and I think you've managed to energise and incredibly, maybe one of the... it's one of the central debates we have is how can we become... how can we make ourselves more accountable. And you've done a lot of work in terms of laying the foundations, developing the assets, for us to transform the system, but I also hear you saying that it hasn't happened yet. And so if you had one wish, one thing you could change, to make sure that this actually transformed us as a system, what would that be? What would that one thing be that will change the way we are? That would change the way we are accountable to the people we serve?

I think, you know, I don't have a simple answer to that question. There's not one thing that one needs to do. I think, you know, as I was saying, countability players like us and like others, have a role to play. But you know, responsibility must be collective and should include all those with the power, the resources and the rationale to make a difference. And if they do, I think people who are affected by this crisis will be a step closer to having a say in the way decisions are taken on their behalf. So I think I guess the one thing I would like to see would be a recognition of this broader responsibility for accountability and steps taken to make that a reality.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.