Alina Potts
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Engaging refugee women and girls as experts: co-creating evidence on sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian crises using creative, participatory methods’, part of the Special Issue on Creativity and Co-production.
Efforts to build evidence on how best to deliver humanitarian assistance have grown over the past decade, at a time when the number of forcibly displaced people in the world has risen to over 84 million. Yet crisis-affected people are often left out of shaping the questions asked, and participating in answering them. Creative, participatory research methods can break down these silos and enable the co-production of evidence with displaced populations, and its uptake for practice and policy. The ‘Empowered Aid‘ study engages in participatory action research with refugee women and girls in Uganda and Lebanon to examine how to better prevent sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in aid delivery. Co-producing knowledge about violence with those most affected by it creates actionable evidence to reduce risks.
In humanitarian settings, pre-existing power imbalances due to gender, age, and other factors can be exacerbated. While women and children account for a large share of the displaced, they are often left out of decision making, despite the impact aid delivery has on their lives and their heightened risk of gender-based violence, including sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA). While a system of reporting and response has been put in place over the last two decades, many survivors are discouraged from using it due to a lack of access, information, and trust in the process or the organisations leading it. Accountability mechanisms have also focused on responding to abuses already perpetrated, rather than working to prevent them.
Our Evidence & Policy article provides examples of how participatory, creative processes can be used to lower barriers for those most affected by SEA in displacement contexts – women and girls – to participate not only as respondents in interviews or focus groups, but as members of the research team who were involved in data collection and meaning making processes. Participatory action research was undertaken with 26 women and girls living as refugees in Lebanon and 29 in Uganda – two of the largest refugee-hosting countries in the world.
How creative, participatory practices enabled co-production of evidence in research with displaced populations
Over the course of three months, these 55 refugee co-researchers used ethnographic methods (participant observation) to systematically observe and document their and their peers’ lived experiences accessing life-saving humanitarian aid. Observations were shared back through a variety of creative, participatory methods including community mapping, listing and ranking, drama, role plays, visualisations, drawing and body mapping.[1] The emphasis on visual and dramatic methods meant that literacy, including computer literacy, was not a barrier to participation.
How creative, participatory practices enabled co-produced evidence to be actioned in humanitarian practice and policy
Data was co-analysed and the refugee co-researchers led development and prioritising of a set of contextual safeguarding recommendations for aid actors: in other words, making sure the context within which aid distributions occur is safe and that steps are taken to proactively mitigate known SEA risks, rather than responding only after an incident of harm has occurred. In the ‘implementation science’ phase the Empowered Aid team worked with NGO partners to apply these recommendations to aid distributions and monitor how they worked, through improved M&E tools. The adapted tools and outcomes of the pilots form an evidence-based toolkit that can be further adapted by other humanitarian actors to support contextualised identification and prioritisation of ways to improve aid distributions.
How the bureaucratic and organisational (aid) ecosystems that define humanitarian settings can limit the effectiveness of co-production
While aid programmes often incorporate participatory methods in their assessments, these are often not designed for longer-term engagement, as aid, by its nature, is meant to be short-lived. Despite global averages of 20 years in displacement, funding cycles still often fall on one-year (or shorter) increments. One-off focus group discussions or other community engagements, carried out year after year around the same topics with little visible sign of improvement or direct dissemination of findings to displaced communities, can leave them to view data collection and research as both extractive and divorced from their realities. Multi-year funding is supportive of trust-building, however without it, trust can be built by increasing transparency at all stages of research, through including those most affected in decisions about design, implementation, analysis and dissemination. Creating space for feedback – whether positive or negative – and showing that the feedback was listened to by responding to it within the course of the study, is also important for building trust.
Why it matters
Our Evidence & Policy article seeks to show how participatory, creative practices can serve to ‘demystify’ research praxis and lower the barriers to engagement, particularly for those whose citizenship status, literacy level, or dependency on aid, mean that they are often asked questions without being asked what the questions should be. In this case, the researchers from refugee communities have access to particular knowledge and expertise that goes untapped, to the detriment of those working to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian aid. Should it not be accessed in ways that meet the needs of the knowers (affected women and girls), rather than those who seek to know (aid actors)? The “Empowered Aid’ study recognises women and girls as experts on contextual safeguarding who are fully capable of not only sharing, but making meaning out of their experiences, when participatory, creative co-production approaches are also applied to data synthesis and analysis processes.
[1] The tools and processes are documented and available for use at: https://globalwomensinstitute.gwu.edu/empowered-aid-resources
Alina Potts is a Research Scientist at the Global Women’s Institute at the George Washington University and former aid worker. Her work centers women and girls in asking and answering questions around how to better address gender-based violence in humanitarian settings.
Image credit: Author’s own.
You can read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Potts, A. Fattal, L. and Kolli, H. (2022). Engaging refugee women and girls as experts: co-creating evidence on sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian crises using creative, participatory methods. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/174426421X16420949265777. OPEN ACCESS
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