Influence at the Right Level: Targeted Assessment and Information Management for the Mosul Humanitarian Response in Iraq
The humanitarian response to the Mosul conflict in Iraq involves many NGOs, UN organizations and branches of the Iraqi and Kurdistan regional government. It was preceded by months of planning by organizations stationed in Erbil, and was an additional emergency situation, on top of the massive displacement from multiple previous conflicts in Iraq and Syria.
As with any humanitarian response different agencies have different roles, and different people within agencies play different functions. These people require information to do their work in planning, executing or funding humanitarian response. As the process of collecting, processing and making this information available can be quite complex, I’ve written a guide to how it is performed currently in Iraq. The industry as a whole has poor knowledge management so I also hope, with this article, to provoke and promote discussion and further development of the theory and practice of information and assessment in the humanitarian sector.
Structure of an Information Management System for Assessments
For this analysis I describe high level decision makers who decide on strategy, medium level decision makers who decide on response options and coordination and low level decision makers who decide on operational implementation. Information is supplied by assessors, which may be individuals or organizations, to information managers, who move and analyse the information in the system. Responders, generally organizations, are the final contact to the affected population.
In this analysis I also describe different assessment types. Assessments are used in the humanitarian system to inform decision makers about the type and quantity of needs, as well as the priority and operational factors that might influence response. Decisions taken are either on strategy (‘what are our objectives?’), response options (‘with the objective in mind, what intervention is appropriate?’), and operations (‘how shall we implement?’).
It’s also important to note the context for the work being done in humanitarian disasters. In essence the problem is that people have some of their essential needs unmet, and the capacity of their regular community and government coping mechanisms — for example, social welfare, family, religious groups, health system — cannot meet them either. Simply, this is the basis for declaring an emergency — the regular system is broken, and help is urgently needed.
When organizations arrive to help, the decision makers need to comprehend the situation before they know how to respond. To do this, as a first step, they organize assessments. Information managers then take the assessment data and provide organized information for decision-makers at all three levels.
With proper information management, the information will flow from the affected people and the context, to the assessors, and onwards to decision-makers. The structure of information flow looks like this:
Information Types for Decision-Makers
The three decision makers in the centre of the diagram are three core stakeholder groups in the humanitarian response. Each requires a different sort of information to produce their essential outputs: Strategies, response options and operational plans. The arrows represent Information moving from one actor to another, which is assisted on its path with tools and systems devised by information managers.
High-level decision makers require aggregated, trend information, on a relatively infrequent basis, coinciding with important meetings, or the production of appeal documents. This might include, overall number of displaced people per week in various categories, progress of camp construction or overall contingency stocks of all humanitarian actors. This is used for setting the objectives for a response, the prioritisation between sectors, activities and beneficiary types, and setting the strategy for the future. High-level decision makers are Humanitarian Coordinators, OCHA Head of Office, Government Authorities, Donor Representatives and Heads of UN agencies and NGOs.
Mid-level decision makers require assessment information on the current situation at a medium level of aggregation, such as governorate or district, or over a certain time period, and access to contextual and operational information, such as presence or absence of markets, overcrowding of camps or clinics, government policy on, for instance, return of IDPs to their homes. They need to know about priorities and reoccurring operational bottlenecks to be able to advocate and plan for these to be solved in a systematic fashion. For guidance they need strategic direction from the high-level decision makers. All this information is used to choose which response options best fit the strategy and the context, and prepare for operations or further in-depth assessment. Mid-level decision makers are cluster coordinators, heads and deputy heads of NGOs, programme coordinators and heads of working groups, for example on cash transfers.
Low-level decision makers require detailed location-based information, at a low level of aggregation, on a rapid basis. They need, for instance, the results of assessments at a camp or village level, such as number of families needing shelter assistance, or number of pregnant or lactating women, as soon as it is collected. This information is used to plan immediate responses and longer term interventions. Low-level decision makers are guided by the plans and provisions made by the Mid-level decision makers. Low-level decision makers are the leaders of operational field teams in NGOs and UN agencies, logisticians, program managers and technical leads in these organizations.
Information managers move information through the system to the decision makers at various levels. To do that they create tools to collect information, systems to store it, and products to make it accessible. Information managers hold discussions with decision-makers on how to analyse and present the information for the best impact. This can involve the level of aggregation, frequency of product production and other parameters, such as, geographic area, specific sectors, trends.
Given the needs for information at each of the levels, it is useful to think about how such information should be collected.
Information Collection Strategies
Each disaster has its own pattern, and each differs from others in critical ways, often meaning that information collection strategies need to be altered, and cannot simply be replicated from place to place.
Important considerations are:
- Whether the population has faced a sudden singular disaster or is undergoing a chronic crisis
- Whether access to the affected population hinders information collection and what can be known
- Whether the effects of a disaster are uniformly felt or if there are pockets of extreme need
- Whether the disaster is of a size where individuals or families can be helped with targeted assistance or if the numbers are so large that blanket assistance must be given at the level of the community
- Whether distinguishable groups are more affected than others in a given location.
Depending on the type of disaster the emergency phase may last a week and be confined to a single location, or may last months and move location or have another pattern. An earthquake, for example, is characterised by a single point of highest needs, but during a war or a drought, the point of extreme need may move, or may be very widespread. An acute disaster situation may require several levels of assessment, from rapid to in-depth, but in chronic and shifting situations, the need for rapid assessments may be continuous and in-depth assessments may need to occur at different locations concurrently. That is to say that following an earthquake the series of assessments is more linear than in a conflict or chronic situation.
The information management techniques for assessing, storing, analyzing and creating information products in each situation are also different and need to reflect to the acute or chronic nature of the crisis or whether it is a shifting acute crisis.
The Mosul conflict and resulting displacement is an interesting case study for a prolonged emergency with a shifting point of extreme need. The tools needed for assessing, storing and analysing the information are unique to the situation.
The following section continues the discussion on Assessment and Information Management with the example of Mosul, in February 2017.
