Getting to “Yes” in South Sudan
The visit had taken weeks of complicated logistical planning; the flights were long and interrupted by constant announcements asking for our feedback; the weather took a particular dislike to the IRC field office plastic table: I ventured out of my hut after the rain to find said table impaled by a tree branch. But there we were, finally designing a feedback and response mechanism with the community health team.
I had originally thought that designing the mechanism would be an easy first step towards being more responsive to our clients. That the hard part would be motivating and enabling our colleagues do something different with the perspectives our clients have shared with them.
In many ways, my experience in South Sudan has proven my initial assumptions true. Designing the feedback mechanism isn’t rocket science. But, it does take time and effort to get it right. And, yes, we’re all still trying to figure out the gargantuan task of creating the capacity, capabilities, money, and funding flexibility to allow us to act upon the perspectives that our clients have shared with us. Perhaps underlying it all is the fact that client responsiveness just isn’t taken as a given. I’m still hoping that one day a review of how we are responding to their clients’ perspectives will be a standing item on our programme management meeting agendas, much in the same way that we review our security updates, funding pipeline, budget-versus-actuals and progression towards outcomes and objectives. Unfortunately no one has yet found the magic mind-set shift formula. That may prove to be the hardest part yet.
But cut back to Northern Bahr El Ghazal.
At the end of the question development workshop with the health team, we asked them whether they thought the client feedback they would get would benefit their work: a definitive thumbs up. When we asked them how they felt about the time and effort required in developing and then implementing the mechanism, well, their thumbs were horizontal.
The International Rescue Committee are working with Ground Truth Solutions to test their approach to gathering, sharing and acting upon client feedback. We’re learning a lot about the process of operationalising it. What’s appealing to us is that their method uses very few questions to get to the heart of the issues most important to our clients and to us, and hopefully without either of us getting too tired and fed up in the process. This is where so many other feedback mechanisms fail. But if you only have eight questions, they have to be just right. And that takes time. And a lot of back and forth.
We’d spent days — even weeks — wordsmithing the English versions of those eight questions. Just pass them over for translation and we’re ready! Wrong. I watched on as the team spent many hours enthusiastically debating whether “Yes” should be translated into “Ai”. (That that only works if you qualify the “yes” by following it with further explanation of what you’re saying “yes” to). And then “No” could be “Ne” or “Ye” (depending on who you’re speaking to and where). And we hadn’t even come to the questions themselves.
A first set of translations had already been field tested. We’d spent the day before out in nearby villages to see whether the questions would be understood as we’d intended them to be. One particular conversation, with a woman named Akim, stayed with me. The final question we tested asked whether she thought that IRC would do anything differently as a result of her participation in the survey.
Akim responded quite simply:
“by giving you this information, I think it will help you to make the programme better.”
Now if that isn’t motivation to invest the time and effort into asking and acting on our clients’ feedback, then what will be?
This blog is a re-issue of the one I wrote back in late 2015. In my second month in post with the International Rescue Committee’s Client Voice and Choice Initiative, we set off for South Sudan to launch the first three of our pilots with Ground Truth Solutions at Keystone Accountability.
