Perceptions of community engagement in the Cyclone Idai response
On 14 March 2019, Cyclone Idai made landfall in Mozambique, causing havoc in the country and across the region. Following funding from the H2H Network, CDAC deployed a Communication, Community Engagement and Accountability (CCEA) Coordinator to Mozambique in early April based at UN OCHA, Beira supporting, among others, the Community Engagement working group.
In this perceptions survey, CDAC partner, Equip Mozambique, spoke to communities that had been affected by the Cyclone and had received aid to ascertain the perceived levels of community engagement from organisations that responded. While feedback and participation seem to have been successfully mainstreamed, such efforts have yet to be fully translated into fully tangible results. Other findings include:
Feedback and participation seems have been successfully mainstreamed – at least at the organisational and operational level, with 97% of organisations claiming to collect feedback from communities, with 83% of organisations formally tracking feedback from communities. However, the response to feedback can sometime seem slow, with at least 50% of organisations having a response time for 7 days or longer.
While 61% of respondents received information about the aid, only 30% had a clear idea about now and where to access humanitarian services and assistance. This suggests that, while humanitarian communications is good, it is still some way off being adequate.
Communication and Community Engagement appears to have been largely embraced as a core function of humanitarian action, with 83% of organisations reporting targets for community engagement in the Cyclone Idai response. However, it would seem that such efforts have yet to be fully translated into tangible results, with 40% of community respondents perceiving that organisations did not take their feedback into account.
Although Cyclone Idai deployed a number of different communications technologies, face-to-face communication from aid workers and community leaders remained the primary way that people received information about aid.