Field Visit Report: Pamati Kita Project, Tacloban, 24 – 28th November 2014
Alex Jacobs, Director of Programme Quality, Plan International
1st December 2014
I am very grateful to the staff of Plan’s Emergency Response Programme office in Tacloban, the
Philippines, for their warm welcome during my short visit. In particular, Enan Melencio, the Pamati
Kita team and Richard Sandison were very generous with their time and insights.
My goals were to work specifically on the Pamati Kita “Common Accountability Services Project”, to:
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Understand progress to date, operating realities & the partnership with World Vision & IOM.
Provide technical support and advice.
Confirm priorities for the second half of the project.
Confirm arrangements, goals & activities for the Learning Component of the project.
Strengthen collaboration among the diverse people and partners involved on the project.
I had the privilege of meetings with Catherine Green (World Vision), Eilish Hurley (UNHCR), the team
at Radyo Abante led by Fred Padernos, and the Tacloban Working Group on AAP/CwC. In addition, I
had extensive talks with the Pamati Kita team (including staff from Plan, World Vision and IOM – the
latter including Nicolas Cardenas who had just arrived as Deputy Project Manager). I also met
frequently with Gloria Donate (Plan UK) and Richard Sandison (Plan’s Emergency Response
Programme Manager), as well as running a half day workshop on Accountability to Affected People
for approximately 50 members of Plan’s Emergency Response team, at Richard’s request (see
Appendix for notes). Throughout I worked closely with Margie Buchanan Smith, the consultant
leading work on the Learning Component of the project. Finally, I had a debriefing with Carin van der
Hor (Plan’s Country Director) in Manila. I have learned a great deal from working with everyone
mentioned above.
Original concept and progress to date
The Pamati Kita project aims to enhance agencies’ accountability to affected people (AAP)1 by
creating and implementing collective approaches, for use by different agencies. As a result, it aims to
enhance decision making at multiple levels and improve the quality of humanitarian work. The
project is a collaboration by Plan International, World Vision International and the International
Organisation of Migration.
Within weeks of Typhoon Haiyan striking in November 2013, the initial project concept was
discussed with OCHA’s first AAP Co-ordinator, Barb Wigley. A concept note was developed in
December 2013. Various options for resourcing the project were explored without success in the
following months. From March – June 2013, a consultant worked in Tacloban and, with support from
others including Plan UK, secured funding from the UK government’s Department for International
Development (DFID) for a period of eight months. The project was formally launched on 1st July 2014
with an inception meeting that month. It took further time to recruit staff and finalise organisational
and financial agreements between the three implementing partners.
Since inception, the team has undertaken preparatory work and delivered initial services. This has
included staff training and establishing hubs in Ormuc, Roxas and Tacloban. Staff have built
relationships with other NGOs, not least by playing an active role in supporting leadership on the
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The definition of this term is contested. See the Appendix for the definition used in this report: “enabling the people we
aim to help to influence what we do”, by providing them with information, listening to them & responding to them.
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inter-agency Working Groups on AAP & CwC. They have carried out other activities including:
assembling a basket of tools and discussing best practices with NGOs, developing initial
communications materials and relationships with radio stations, and facilitating community dialogue
with local government units.
The changing context
Pamati Kita’s progress has been slower than hoped to date, due to delays involving all organisations
concerned. This is not entirely surprising, giving the context of a major humanitarian response.
Delays have been caused by: the high volume of work and level of staff turnover involved in a major
humanitarian response, the inevitable complexities of inter-agency collaboration (including securing
funding), and the difficulty of ensuring consistent management attention for AAP.
The major changes in the working context between the original concept and the present day are
more significant for the project. In the early stages of the response, it may have been appropriate to
set up a common hotline and to pilot common tools for quantitative feedback and information
provision (as originally envisaged). In the year since the typhoon struck, many different agencies
have established their own accountability mechanisms, including many hotlines. Agencies have
diversified their work, moving beyond distributions to areas such as construction, capacity building
and gender work. The government has declared that the overall work should move to a recovery
phase and established the Office of the Presidential Assistant for Rehabilitation and Recovery
(OPARR) to co-ordinate this. UNHCR is leaving Tacloban in November and OCHA is leaving in
December. Locally owned accountability mechanisms have been created, ranging from Radyo
Abante in Tacloban (a “humanitarian radio station” which broadcasts programmes on the
humanitarian response and has its own hotline and talk shows) to eMPATHY (a government website
that lists the budgets of all projects undertaken in response to the typhoon, at the Barangay level,
currently covering 2,411 projects with a collective budget of over US$515m).
In addition, research has been carried out on the experience of AAP in the response to date,
including CDAC’s Learning Review & Case Studies and IOM’s report Starting the Conversation. The
Interagency Humanitarian Evaluation has carried out field research on AAP. DFID’s evaluation has
selected Accountability as one of its three core themes. Research to date consistently shows that
affected people’s preferred method of engagement with agencies is through face-to-face dialogue.
Hotlines have a role to play, as one mechanism among several, but face a number of limitations. An
issue for feedback mechanisms is that community members do not seem to distinguish a great deal
between the different agencies (and their partners) who provide them with services.
The Tacloban inter agency Working Group on AAP & CwC appears to have played an impressive and
significant role. Chaired by OCHA, it has co-ordinated the use of a common “Community Feedback
Form”. Each month, each participating agency has completed this form, summarising the major
issues they have heard from communities about the response, as well as their sources of data. Issues
are grouped together by sector, along with suggestions for improvement made by the community.
At Working Group meetings, actions are identified, including who to refer issues to (e.g. sector
clusters, or government offices). The Working Group chairs have followed up these issues between
meetings and it is reported that work has been adjusted as a result. This innovative mechanism
fulfils one of Pamati Kita’s original aims, by providing an overview of community views in ways that
influence decision making at a senior level, across the response.2
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This is the same function that the Groundtruth pilot currently seeks to fill in Sierra Leone on the Ebola
response, using the different mechanism of high volume polling.
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Pamati Kita: Looking ahead
The Pamati Kita team held two workshops during this visit, to review the project’s aims and
activities.
The overall aim was seen to remain valid. Many agencies continue to undertake a great deal of work,
which could be supported and improved by greater accountability to affected people. As OCHA
leaves the response, Pamati Kita will take on the leadership of the Working Groups. As the
government takes on leadership of the recovery phase, Pamati Kita can play an important role in
helping to strengthen their state – citizen accountability. This is an exciting prospect, particularly in
relation to locally led accountability initiatives which can have a longer term impact, at scale,
embedded within civil society.
Some of the project’s activities remained appropriate and some needed to be updated, in order to
remain relevant. Staff have already started to evolve some activities this way. The initial revisions
identified are summarised in the table below. They are not yet finalised, as the project team still has
to review them in detail and determine what will be completed in the current phase, running until
February 2015 and what will continue beyond then.
Original activities
Output 1: Collect, analyse & promote a basket
of tools for NGOs (and others) to strengthen
their accountability to affected people.
Output 2: Implement a common hotline &
promote it (and accountability more widely)
through media including radio & comics.
Output 3: Strengthen & promote IOM’s
Common Response Map as an on-line
mechanism to track comments received and
responses to them.
Output 4: Training for NGOs.
Revisions
- No change.
- Strengthen client-focus, in order to make the
tools useful to other organisations.
- Promote existing mechanisms (e.g. Radyo
Abante / EMPATHY / others) and the concept
that citizens have the right to be heard, using a
variety of media.
- Add: Lead the Working Groups, including use of
the Community Feedback Form.
- Continue training on accountability, as planned.
- Work with NGOs to facilitate community
dialogue with service providers, in order to raise
issues & identify solutions.
- Remove PSEA training, in order to strengthen
focus on accountability.
Reflections
The Inter Agency Humanitarian Evaluation team commented that this response put more emphasis
on accountability to affected people than any other has ever done before. There has been a wide
range of good practice, among individual agencies and at a higher level for the sector as a whole,
creating the opportunity to identify powerful lessons for the future.
The Working Groups and Community Feedback Forms stand out as innovations that made local
people’s views visible at the highest level of UN co-ordination. The work of Radyo Abante is well
documented and impressive, as an independent mechanism for holding agencies to account. World
Vision deployed a large team of dedicated accountability staff early in the response, who developed
a wide range of ways to engage with local people.
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There is also a pervading sense that, despite this, the promise of improved accountability was not
completely fulfilled. The principle seems to be established that “Effective humanitarian response
requires good two-way communication that provides useful information and engages communities
in dialogue.”3 But practice may lag behind. The Learning Component of Pamati Kita will research this
carefully. It is hoped that it will make a serious contribution to our understanding of AAP in the
response to Typhoon Haiyan, to inform future practice. The key research questions and methods for
the Learning Component are being finalised, following this trip.
Some areas to explore and potentially strengthen include:
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“AAP” and “CwC” have become technical areas, with their own jargon, experts, standards
and tools, partially overlapping with other areas like Preventing Sexual Exploitation and
Abuse (“PSEA”). This is the result of creating standardised approaches to managing AAP, that
tend to focus on specific tools (like hotlines, suggestion boxes and training). It risks creating
its own bureaucratic machinery which does not always achieve its ultimate aims, rather than
consistently encouraging straight forward dialogue, achieved by staff spending time on the
ground with communities. A simpler, intuitive term may help.
Some communication messages and approaches have been created from an agency
perspective, rather than a beneficiary perspective. For instance, this includes using jargon
and the language of international standards and ‘accountability’, rather than plain language.
Separate radio stations have been created, with limited reach. These may have been
appropriate initially, but their coverage may have been quickly overtaken by commercial
radio stations.
There has been a level of confusion about the purpose of accountability efforts. They can
aim to (a) respond to individuals’ concerns, or (b) improve the performance of individual
projects, or (c) improve oversight of the response as a whole. Pamati Kita ambitiously aimed
to address all three levels together. To some extent agencies may have focused on (a) above
more than (b). (a) is more manageable, whereas (b) is more challenging as it can involve reorienting project activities. This focus on (a) may have led to a more superficial level of
accountability actually being achieved, at times.
It is not clear how accessible different accountability mechanisms have been to different
groups of people. It is also unclear how much community members’ views have been
disaggregated, for instance separating the views of women and girls, or other groups who
are prone to be excluded. This means that the views of less powerful groups may have been
overlooked, and so agency activities may have unintentionally reinforced social exclusion.
Collecting disaggregated data is always more time consuming and harder to manage.
There is a general sense that, in many agencies across the response, staff have struggled to
secure the time and management attention needed to achieve a high level of accountability.
They still seem to be swimming against the tide of pressure to spend large budgets in short
timeframes by implementing pre-determined activities in a relatively inflexible manner. It is
not clear whether relationships between international agencies and local NGOs have been
flexible and supportive partnerships (which would be aligned with and enable AAP) or rigid
sub-contracting arrangements.
Different agencies have taken different approaches to managing accountability at an
organisational level, varying from promoting a few specific tools to enabling influential
dialogue in contextually appropriate ways. World Vision’s approach appears to have been
relatively successful, combining: a simple high level Programme Accountability Framework,
consistent support from leadership, and significant investment in dedicated staff positions
on the ground.
CDAC Learning Review
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When asked how international agencies could improve their accountability to affected people,
Jazmin Bonifacio, a highly experienced reporter for Radio Abante who has spent months working on
precisely this issue, said, “They really need to find time to talk to the beneficiaries personally and not
with questionnaires.”
Conclusions
These reflections reinforce the view that it is not straightforward for agencies to be meaningfully
accountable to affected populations. Successful approaches have to be carefully tailored to the local
context, because they have to make sense from beneficiaries’ point of view (including groups of
people who are typically excluded). As a sector, we are still learning how to balance the costs and
benefits of different approaches. Some of the concrete tools we have focused on (such as suggestion
boxes or hotlines) may have significant limitations and risk being superficial. Due to the realities of
donor contracts and the volume of work to be handled, there is constant and possibly growing
pressure for staff to spend less time with communities, listening to what they say, and limited
opportunities to respond.
In these circumstances, accountability is only likely to be achieved when led by staff on the ground
who have the specific remit and time to focus on it and develop locally appropriate approaches, and
who have sufficient management support to ensure adequate resourcing and influence with project
implementation teams.
By far the best form of accountability appears to be direct face-to-face conversation between agency
staff and community members. This human interaction has the benefit of humanising ‘beneficiaries’
and ‘agency staff’ to each other, and strengthening motivation and compassion. Given the pressures
of initial response and the scale of operations, it may often be appropriate to supplement time spent
together with other mechanisms, including mass communications.
There still appears to be scope for testing a common hotline and common quantitative feedback
indicators in the early phases of a major humanitarian response. The arguments behind them still
hold, though perhaps in a weakened form. For instance, some agencies expressed reservations
about receiving complaints about sensitive issues through a common mechanism. The experience of
Pamati Kita shows that these mechanisms would need to be set up in advance, including securing
agreement to collaborate on them from a critical mass of agencies. A new feedback app developed
by Plan India may be useful in this regard.
The OCHA AAP and CwC co-ordinators and the Working Groups appear to have played a crucial role
in strengthening the attention placed on accountability and its practice early on. The importance of
this leadership presence on the ground echoes the points above, as a necessary factor for
strengthening accountability, in line with the UN’s Transformative Agenda. Initial reports that similar
co-ordinators have not been welcomed by Humanitarian Co-ordinators in other responses are
concerning for all agencies involved in humanitarian response and should be followed up.
A set of actions is starting to emerge as priorities for how donors could strengthen AAP in
humanitarian response, including: (a) fund dedicated staff positions focused on community
engagement (as a service within agency offices similar to finance or procurement), (b) allow (or
require) budgets and activities for grants to be re-planned after approximately three months, based
on evidence of the views of external stakeholders including community members, government
bodies and others (possibly for any project that is more than six months long), (c) require that
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agencies’ progress reports include evidence of communities’ views of the work carried out, and (d)
fund accountability staff and activities at the central co-ordinating level.
For Plan, the conclusions above apply. We have a high level framework for Plan, set out in the CCCD
Standards as Standard 5. We need to implement this by investing in staff who can focus on applying
it at the field level and ensuring they have appropriate management support, and by making time for
all project staff to regularly spend time with communities. We also need to continue to invest in
developing tools and approaches that have the potential to contribute to practice across the sector,
such as quantitative feedback tools. Our work on programme quality, CCCD and partnership more
broadly has an important role to play in achieving this, as does our work on reducing and
streamlining bureaucracy.
Deja vu and the way ahead?
It is striking that for at least the last twenty years, there have been a series of efforts in the NGO
sector to improve how we engage with recipient communities. These have varied from work on
participation, for instance promoted by Robert Chambers, to “AAP”, promoted by HAP from around
ten years ago. However, to some extent we are still wrestling with the same issues. For instance,
ALNAP’s report from last month Rhetoric or Reality? describes how the sector is making patchy
progress with examples of good practice among a general sense of not meeting our commitments. It
is the latest in a long line of similar publications.
Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking “why is community engagement (or
AAP, or CwC, or participation) important?” or “how do we improve community engagement in
individual projects”, we could ask “why does community engagement tend to be marginalised and
how can it be made more consistently prominent on management agendas?”. This would lead to a
different starting point, enquiring about which factors tend to dominate management decision
making in practice and how community engagement is placed among them. The Learning
Component of Pamati Kita hopes to contribute some evidence to this question. Anecdotal evidence
suggests that the growth of ambition and budgets, allied with inadequate upwards accountability for
the quality of work carried out, continues to crowd out space for genuine community engagement.
The adoption and use of the new Core Humanitarian Standard may also present a new opportunity
to address these entrenched issues. Or perhaps host governments, as in the Philippines, will take
more power to regulate humanitarian action on their own terms.
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Appendix
Notes from Accountability to Affected People Workshop, Tacloban, 26th November 2014
This workshop involved approximately 50 members of Plan Emergency Response Team’s staff and
ran for three hours. Due to the large size and short length of the workshop, it was only possible to
capture headline points from discussion. Most of the time was spent by staff in their project teams
discussing the issues below.
The workshop used the following practical definition of AAP: “enabling the people we aim to help to
influence what we do”. We discussed how this can be achieved by: providing information about who
we are and what we are doing, listening to people’s views and responding to what people tell us.
The major issues that participants raised and discussed are listed below:
Good practices to build on:
 Involving partners & children in pre-implementation.
 Conducting situational analysis.
 Encouraging people to give feedback.
 Transparency & providing accurate information.
 Working intensively with government.
 Holding community conversations.
 Involving community in pre-bidding / procurement.
 Staff / office presence in the Barangay.
 Suggestion boxes / help desks.
 Youth reporters, gathering feedback & conducting community screenings.
 Selecting beneficiaries through Barangay Beneficiary Committees & posting selected
beneficiaries.
 Involving vulnerable sectors in community consultations.
Barriers we face to being accountable to affected people:
 Traditional power structures and respect for traditional leaders (may make it harder for
people to raise their views).
 Politics and political considerations at the Barangay and other levels.
 The language barrier: community members may not speak official languages.
 Beneficiaries are busy.
 Limited trust and confidence of beneficiaries in humanitarian agencies.
 Accessibility.
 Difficulty of establishing effective communications with partners and staff.
 Lack of initial consultations. Mismatch between activities and community needs.
 Fixed project activities and limited timeframes.
 Lack of financial and human resources for AAP.
 Internal management processes.
 Limited concrete ways to close the feedback loop (and respond to issues people raise)
 Staff capacity, including knowledge, skills and attitudes.
Ways of improving our accountability to affected people:
 Improving downwards reporting, e.g. with regular updates to communities at project
meetings or in Barangay General Assemblies.
 Improving our understanding of community profiles, and who is involved in our work and
who is not.
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Spending more time with communities and talking with people.
Review projects and activities using a CCCD lens (using the CCCD Standards).
Integrating AAP orientations in Plan’s activities, e.g. workshops.
Hire people who speak the same dialects as recipient communities.
Hold regular staff trainings.
Include AAP activities in staff’s annual objectives.
Include AAP in orientations for newly hired staff.
Continue the good practices identified.
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