Collaborative Approaches to Creating Community-Based Solutions
In Ecuador, three different projects show how engaging the community delivers meaningful results.
By Amy Lynn Smith, Independent Writer + Strategist
If you need to address a problem that’s impacting a community, what’s the best way to find a solution? Involve the people who are living with the problem on a daily basis. After all, they know what they need and what resources are available — and they can lead the way in developing the solution that works best for them. It’s a collaborative process sometimes referred to as human-centered design, which is exactly what it sounds like: Putting people at the center of both identifying key problems and developing, testing, and implementing new approaches that will work best for them.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) faces significant challenges related to the influx of millions of refugees from Venezuela into Latin America and the Caribbean. In the last three years alone, 900,000 Venezuelans have sought asylum, which is a large number of people to assist in a relatively short time. But some imaginative, collaborative projects supported by UNHCR’s Innovation Service’s Innovation Fund are co-designing solutions with NGO partners and refugees — and they’re making a difference.
There are Innovation Fund projects around the world, but Ecuador has a number underway right now. This demonstrates not only the imagination of the teams that applied to the Fund — and their creative response to growing challenges related to forced displacement in Ecuador — but also the commitment top management in Ecuador has made to fostering a culture of innovation.
Here are three examples of projects that are using co-design approaches to address the needs of displaced people across Ecuador, by engaging the host community, people of concern, and local organizations in the process of developing the most effective solutions.
1. Supporting community-based decision-making
Empowering refugees and other people of concern to take an active role in their community means listening closely to what they think that role might be. That’s the idea behind Project ComIn — the Inclusive Communities Project — which was designed by the Pichincha Field Office. According to Peter Martinez, Senior Field Assistant at the office, the vision was to put the people of the community at the center of designing solutions to two common challenges: improving social integration and creating more work opportunities.
“We need to understand what the communities have to offer, what their skills are, what their dreams are,” he explains. “Sometimes as humanitarians we just go in and say ‘This is what you need to do,’ but we decided from the beginning to let the communities tell us what they want to do and what their skills are.”
The team sought out an area that was facing the very challenges they wanted to involve the community in solving. So they chose Baños, a small town with a high percentage of people of concern that was also struggling with an economic downturn. According to Marga Arboleda, Livelihoods Assistant at the field office, Baños was a perfect fit.
The UNHCR team gathered members of the community for the project, which began with an exploration of the community’s most pressing needs. Ultimately, they settled on two areas of focus: discrimination, or lack of integration, and the challenge of finding work that could support refugees and their families.
From there, Project ComIn took a creative approach to community-based protection. Participants were invited to think like children — letting their imaginations flow freely to envision new ideas. Then the team used innovation processes to make abstract ideas more tangible, creating and testing prototypes of solutions. Finally, the team took action, making concrete plans to implement the ideas they had developed together. After that, they paused to evaluate what they had accomplished so far and determine how well it worked.
For the next phase of the project, the team hopes to make the methodology available in Spanish, either through a board game, video game, or graphic novel. They will prototype some of their ideas before deciding on the best approach for moving forward.
Creating new community leaders
One community member who was part of the process is Gabriel Poleo, who came to Ecuador from Venezuela. When given the opportunity, he readily embraced the chance to be part of Project ComIn.
“When I found out I could help other people with other types of problems — I was a teacher back in Venezuela — it made me feel encouraged,” Poleo says. “We don’t all have the same problems but we can still help each other.”
One example of solutions proposed by the team is Kuya Community Cosmetics, which was developed to improve socio-economic integration by establishing a cooperative venture for the production and sale of natural cosmetics. Poleo is now the Vice President of Kuya, which is purposely made up of a diverse group of local community members and refugees.
Built around a philosophy of cooperation and mutual respect, Kuya established production processes, marketing plans, and more, and rented a store where they installed a laboratory and production facility, all with UNHCR’s assistance. They began by producing glycerin soap for sale in markets, but after the coronavirus pandemic hit they began making liquid soap, too, diversifying their products in response to consumer demand. Because the team learned about administration and finance as part of Project ComIn, they’re well-positioned to adapt Kuya to market needs — and to operate as a self-sustaining business.
“The pandemic has been especially hard for people in Baños, which relied heavily on tourism, but we’ve created a network of people who can come to each other to find solutions like this,” Martinez says. “Gabriel also helped put together a group that’s bringing food to people who need it most, so we see an outcome from this that leaders emerge along with a support network in the community, both the locals and the refugees.”
Ultimately, the goal is that the group established by Project ComIn will continue to solve problems together and become self-sufficient. According to Martinez, that’s one of the biggest, most important achievements of the project: creating a network of people that help each other in a small community by sharing whatever skills they have.
“One of the main ideas of this whole process was to build autonomy,” he says. “It’s still a work in progress but we are very proud of it.”
This project demonstrates the important role co-design plays in building a community of people who are consistently motivated to frame the problems that impact them, define priorities, and help develop and oversee the services provided to their communities. The team documented this significant achievement and will share it with others across UNHCR, to identify increasingly more meaningful ways to directly include refugees in decision-making.
2. Collaborating to put data into context
By the end of 2019, 4.5 million Venezuelans had fled their homes. The scale of the emergency required a unified monitoring framework for UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and a team of more than 24 partners in Ecuador — including UN agencies, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local NGOs — to keep track of all of their activities.
The team faced a significant challenge: UNHCR and its partners generate a lot of narrative information, and it’s important to rapidly analyze the information so it can be given to decision-makers who use it to adjust programs to meet the changing needs of refugees.
The first part of the initiative, called the QualMiner Project, was to capture and extract qualitative monitoring information — which is narrative or descriptive, such as what UNHCR staff might write in a situation report — from an information management software program that monitors and evaluates data. Extracting qualitative data has proven to be far more difficult than it is for quantitative information, like numbers. The second part of the challenge is to process, clean, display, and analyze the qualitative data, which has been done in an exploratory way so far, using other programming languages and software in addition to the information management software. Jean-Laurent Martin, UNHCR’s Information Management Officer in Ecuador, was already familiar with the information management software and is equally well-versed in the importance of meaningful data capturing, having worked on the RefuGIS project in Jordan (see related article).
“In an emergency, you don’t have time to develop and test a new database,” he explains. “I thought it was better to work with software we were comfortable with to track narrative information from various parts of the region, and we brought in a data science expert we were already working with to make that happen.”
Text mining, also known as text analysis, is the process of turning raw data into relevant, actionable information. The expert, Gabriela Urgiles, an external Innovation Consultant, understands the challenge UNHCR faces in experimenting with such a project. After all, it’s not common for humanitarian organizations to use qualitative indicators as a form of measurement.
The project came to life thanks to a strong team, both at UNHCR and its external partners, which includes a professor from Penn State University in Pennsylvania with extensive experience in the field.
Uniting quantitative and qualitative data
QualMiner was driven by the need to capture and analyze qualitative data more efficiently as part of the large-team project involving multiple organizations.
Quantitative indicators were captured, extracted, processed, displayed, and analyzed much more efficiently from early in the response. But that data only tells part of the story, which is why adding qualitative data is essential. Martin uses UNHCR’s efforts to reduce xenophobia as an example: You can measure the number of people who were trained in ways to reduce xenophobia, but the numbers don’t tell you how well the training was received or what took place after the training ended — the kind of information that can only be gathered by talking to people, such as UNHCR representatives in the field.
“We want to give the data more context,” Martin says. “So we created a prototype to automate all of this information, and put the quantitative and qualitative data side by side in a dashboard.”
Urgiles adds that qualitative indicators are used to monitor activities that involve processes, rather than only direct assistance, and to provide more relevance to quantitative indicators, which some describe as “cold numbers.”
The team — which will eventually expand to include narrative input from refugees — developed an extraction tool to display qualitative indicators’ data in an accessible and readable way. Then it was read, analyzed, and synthesized to be included in situation reports for decision-making. Without this technology, that process would be very time-consuming given the large amount of qualitative data involved, but the QualMiner Project supports the team’s effort to organize, display, and analyze large sets of text data using automation, Urgiles explains.
She worked with the Penn State professor and UNHCR partner organizations to understand how the organizations generate and input qualitative information into the information management software. The data scientists then worked on the text mining component, to extract the relevant information and present it to everyone involved. It’s another strong example of co-design.
“It was very helpful to hear from our external partners about how they feel about qualitative data, which also strengthened our relationships with them,” Urgiles says. “And because this is such an exploratory project, hearing everyone’s views up front was a key step in the innovation process.”
Martin adds that the project is going very well so far and the final objective is to automate the generation of the information on a monthly basis. He believes other country operations and organizations will be interested in the end result — not to mention donors, who will be able to better understand the work UNHCR does. “We’re continuing to refine it and add new functionality,” he says, “but we are excited to see what more we can learn through text visualization combined with data.”
3. Letting the community lead the way
When he first arrived in Ecuador as an Associate Protection Officer in Community-Based Protection, Innovation Fellow alumnus Diego Nardi brought with him a commitment to improving inclusion of the Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Intersex (LGBTI) community. He says he was pleased to see “a lot of openness” to LGBTI protection in Ecuador and was eager to find ways to do even more, such as opening the first LGBTI shelter in the country in 2019. But there was still work to be done, because homophobia exists everywhere in the world.
In particular, Nardi wanted to work closely with LGBTI refugees in the context of UNHCR’s operations. So when, Francis Fayolle, a former Associate in Field Protection based in Quito, launched an initiative to help field offices better systemize data, he and Nardi saw an opportunity to combine their ideas into a single initiative: mapping all of the LGBTI-friendly businesses, resources, and civil society organizations available to displaced people living in Ecuador. (Read this story on mapping initiatives for more details.)
A portion of the project included asking LGBTI refugees to share information about places where they felt welcome, such as restaurants and gyms. But getting community organizations involved was equally, if not even more, important.
UNHCR partnered with a number of grassroots organizations in Quito and Esmeraldas that work on LGBTI rights and inclusion, and are familiar entities in their local communities.
Because each organization has its own focus — some work with gay men, another works with bisexual women, while yet another is focused on violence prevention — the collaboration covered a diverse range of issues. And the mapping project, which is an ongoing effort, brought UNHCR together with both LGBTI refugees and community-based organizations, yet another example of co-design.
“UNHCR has taken steps to more inclusive programming and I look forward to these first steps being accelerated and expanded, not only for LGBTI people but also people with disabilities, older people, and so on,” Nardi says. “Any opportunity to have their views heard is important and this was a great chance to foster stronger relationships and bring us closer to the community.”
As these three examples clearly demonstrate, UNHCR has a great many good ideas. But they are turned into great ideas when the community that’s living the day-to-day experience — both as host communities and refugees — plays a critical role in creating solutions that work for them.
