Components

User-Centred Community Engagement in rapid-onset emergencies needs to explore people’s needs in-depth whilst engaging with as many people as scarce resources allow. This can be done using the UCCE digital toolkit and Methodology.

UCCE Methodology

The UCCE Methodology is built around two core, interconnected components: Interactive Digital Surveys and Co-Creation Sessions.

Interactive Digital Surveys

Interactive Digital Surveys are designed to engage community members quickly and effectively to identify their priority humanitarian needs. Surveys can be tailored to the specific needs of a particular organisation, context, programme or community. For example, when used to engage children or people with low literacy skills, surveys can include smiley face rating scales to help respondents prioritise their needs, or they can be set up to collect important household-level information from adult caregivers.

Interactive illustrations are a core feature of the Interactive Digital Surveys, making them highly adaptable and inclusive. Illustrations allow survey respondents to identify the so-called “problem areas” by tapping anywhere on the tablet screen. This helps field staff to avoid limiting possible survey responses to a list of predetermined problem areas, enabling a more complete and nuanced identification of needs. Follow-up questions are determined by where respondents tap on a given illustration and allow users to briefly explain their choice.

The insights from Interactive Digital Surveys help humanitarian staff gain initial understanding of issues from a large sample of members of their target community.

Co-creation Sessions

The initial understanding is then taken into community Co-Creation Sessions with children and caregivers. Depending on cultural contexts, the sessions are conducted separately for caregivers of different genders and children of different ages. Activities such as Problem Trees and Dot Voting are used to explore problem areas in more depth, capture current sanitation behaviours and to develop and rank potential improvements to sanitation designs with the community. The session also enables interaction with WASH engineers so that community insights and input can directly influence sanitation design alterations.

Co-Creation Sessions also create the opportunity to help manage the expectations of affected people. It may not be possible for aid agencies to implement all of the solutions that children and caregivers suggest; however, it is important to explain why that may be the case. Honest discussions during Co-Creation Sessions can promote more collaborative and transparent relationships between aid agencies and affected people.

UCCE Digital toolkit

Our newly developed digital toolkit includes both the ‘Web Hub’ and the ‘Digital Tool’.

The Web Hub is an online platform which key feature is the survey builder which allows to build and launch surveys, grouped by project and with an assigned Master Key. Surveys can also be easily translated to a second language to facilitate deployment.

The Digital Tool is an app used to deploy the surveys on Android tablets. The project Master Key provided by the Web Hub is used to access and download the respective surveys. All survey responses can be recorded in an offline mode and uploaded to the server once the internet connection becomes available. The uploaded data is then automatically reported in the Web Hub.

Methodology used for pilots

For the pilots in Bangladesh (2017), Iraq (2018) and Ethiopia (2019), we placed the UCCE two core components within a broader structure of the approach, which includes a training component for field staff, a launch session with the community and a decision-making session where programme staff review community ideas, assess their feasibility and decide on the implementation plan of priority ideas.

The way the components are combined to complement each other can be adapted according to contextual factors of the response (e.g. scope, budget, cultural factors). For the pilots in Bangladesh, Iraq and Ethiopia we combined them to form the following methodology with focus on informing the design of child-friendly sanitation facilities.

Informed by human-centred design principles, UCCE is also designed to be iterative. Following initial ideas implementation and a period of use of facilities by the community, field teams implement a second round of interactive digital surveys to identify any outstanding issues and gauge changes in user behaviour and satisfaction. Further alterations are made as necessary.

Here’s a detailed outline of each of the components used in the pilots.

Note: Methodology was refined after Bangladesh and Iraq pilots. Detailed information about the changes and why these were made can be found UCCE Background.