Seeking to Communicate Better With Refugees, Innovation Fellows Find New Mindsets
This is one in a series of profiles sharing the projects, processes, and learnings of participants in UNHCR’s Innovation Fellowship Program.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Independent Writer + Strategist
Before you read any further, take a moment to try an experiment: Imagine a challenge you currently face in your work. Think about how many possible solutions or new approaches there might be. It doesn’t matter how large or small they are, or whether it’s something your management would approve. Don’t put any limits on your thinking. Just close your eyes for one minute and imagine.
Okay, in that one minute did you think of something you might try? Chances are, you had at least the seed of a new approach. What you just practiced is one of the many elements of the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Innovation Fellowship Program, such as coming up with 100 ideas to address a challenge participants are facing in their work.
It’s important to understand that the Innovation Fellowship Program is not simply about developing a solution and putting it in place. In fact, many innovation projects take much longer than one year to flesh out. But one of the key goals of the Innovation Fellowship is to create opportunities for people to shift their mindsets to new ways of thinking, and understand how different approaches to teamwork and problem-solving may take them on unexpected paths to a solution. What’s more, being curious and open-minded may lead them somewhere entirely different, but just as beneficial.
Here are two stories of Innovation Fellows whose projects are still ongoing more than a year after they completed the formal Program, but whose learnings go far beyond trying to solve a particular problem.
Tania Lovtsova: Exploring better ways to provide information to people of concern
As a UNHCR Community-Based Protection Associate based in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tania Lovtsova used to face an almost daily challenge: Refugees and asylum seekers contacted or visited Lovtsova’s office for information that was already available on a website. But it was a complex document — 26 pages of text, which might be difficult for some people to understand. So instead, people of concern turned to Lovtsova for the specific information they needed.
“We are happy to have conversations about ways our assistance could be improved or to have more meaningful dialogue about their needs,” she explains. “But 90 percent of the time, we were providing very basic information that people could already get, but it was complicated to understand.”
It was then that Lovtsova recognized a need to improve how UNHCR makes people of concern aware of the UNHCR social assistance programs available to them and, even more important, how that information is provided to them. This is an ideal project for an Innovation Fellow, because it requires taking a fresh look at the way UNHCR does things now and imagining the way things could be in the future. Having joined the 2018 cohort of Fellows, Lovtsova began her project during her Fellowship and has continued working on it since, which is often the case for Fellows.
During the early stages of her project, she didn’t simply come up with a solution on her own. She asked refugees and asylum seekers what they wanted and needed. Did they understand the information available to them? How would they like to receive this information? What communication channels would be most convenient?
Lovtsova brought together a team from various UNHCR units in Ukraine’s operations to co-create a questionnaire to answer questions like these. The team worked collaboratively, translating the questionnaire into five languages most commonly spoken by people of concern in Ukraine — Russian, Arabic, Farsi, French, and Somali — with the help of both colleagues and refugees. The questionnaire was distributed among partners in different regions of Ukraine and ultimately returned to Lovtsova for analysis.
“The majority said they would like to receive this information verbally, but many of them also said it would be convenient to have some printed materials to distribute among the community members, especially new arrivals,” Lovtsova explains. “They wanted something that would be easy to understand.”
Direct feedback from people of concern led Lovtsova and her team members to explore various ways to provide simplified printed materials. Ultimately, they plan to create one-page infographics about each of the social assistance programs UNHCR offers. This addresses all the input Lovtsova had received from refugees. Infographics rely heavily on images and very little text, so even though they would be translated into the most common languages spoken by people of concern, they would be easy to understand even by those with lower literacy skills.
Lovtsova discussed the idea with the Information Management (IM) Unit and brainstormed about implementation ideas. In addition to printed infographics, the IM Unit also suggested a secondary online version for people of concern with Internet access, where people could input information such as their gender, age, and more to filter down to the programs that applied to them. But it was at this point in the process that Lovtsova was unsure how to proceed.
The reason she hesitated was because UNHCR Ukraine’s procedures and social assistance programs were in the midst of being revised, a project that would ultimately take a full year. Because she didn’t know what the new information would be, Lovtsova put her project on hold until she knew more, something she later regretted.
Recognizing failure as part of the learning process
“Mistakes are our best friends because they are how we improve,” Lovtsova says. “But I was really out of my comfort zone and didn’t understand at first that innovation is not all about success. It’s about thinking deeper about the problem, turning to your colleagues and asking for assistance — I learned that teamwork is essential to innovation. And in the end, innovation can be very, very small things. It doesn’t have to be a groundbreaking innovation. It can just become part of your daily work.”
In hindsight, she admits that waiting for the updated program information, instead of perhaps trying a small pilot during the interim, was a mistake. The Innovation Fellowship Program encourages activities like small pilots, so she considers not taking that step as a failure on her part.
“They told us that failures are part of our success, which are very valuable words to me,” she explains, “but it’s difficult for me in practice. In the beginning, I felt this pain that I did it wrong, but later I understood that even with that failure I learned something and we began to move forward.”
Lovtsova also says she learned an important lesson about taking ownership of her project and trusting the innovation process, which rarely moves in a linear direction to an end goal. In fact, the best ideas often surface through trial and error. Equally important, she learned it’s vital to show how strongly you believe in your idea and what results you want to achieve. Otherwise, it is very difficult to bring supporters on board who will help you with your project.
Lovtsova says being part of the Innovation Fellowship Program taught her to think differently about everything she does in her job.
“When something you try doesn’t work, you just accept it and try something else,” she says. “I’m grateful for this approach and looking back, I can see ways I would have done things differently on my project.”
The good news is that Lovtsova’s project is, in fact, moving forward. The UNHCR Ukraine procedures and social assistance programs have been updated, and shorter, easier-to-understand versions of them are posted on the website. Work on the printed infographics is underway and Lovtsova hopes to have some of them completed in the near future.
And as an Innovation Fellow alumna, Lovtsova will continue using everything she learned to keep improving the services she and the operation offer to refugees and asylum seekers.
“My perception of failure has changed, as has my approach to problems,” she says. “I’m not afraid to try new things and maybe make a mistake, and to see those mistakes as an opportunity to redo it again in a better way.”
Shiva Ershadi: Understanding communication challenges from refugees’ perspectives
The Innovation Fellowship Program isn’t only for UNHCR staff. A small number of people from other organizations also participate, and one example is Shiva Ershadi, Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). Based in Iran, she was part of the 2018 cohort.
Ershadi works with Afghan refugees and, like Lovtsova, also struggles to find the best ways to share information with them. As she explains, it’s part of her job to listen to the feedback of the refugees NRC works with, understand their needs, and address them. But despite NRC’s best efforts, they could not always make significant progress while trying to improve communication with refugees. Ershadi was determined to find out why.
As an Innovation Fellow, Ershadi knew she had an opportunity to address this challenge. So she set out to learn from the refugees who use NRC’s services about how NRC could share information more effectively.
Ershadi pulled together a team at her office and they conducted a small needs assessment, asking refugees questions such as how they exchange information with each other, how they get information about NRC or the news — and discovered that refugees really weren’t very aware of the programs NRC offered. They considered phone calls, but realized they weren’t a good solution, either, so they needed to find new ways of connecting with refugees.
In addition to looking at the practices of organizations both within and outside the humanitarian sector, the team used a tool called user journey mapping. They worked with refugees to follow the journey of how they’re using NRC’s communication services and how they might be improved. By collaborating with refugees, NRC could look at the communication gap in a different way to identify the real source of the problem and co-create a solution.
“We tried one communication method after another and right now we’re focusing on sharing information updates with people in the field who can pass them on to refugees,” Ershadi says. “This has been a process of learning all along. We’ve gone a certain direction then saw it didn’t work, so we’d try something different and maybe we’d realize it was too challenging, so we’d go back again. This has been a very iterative process where we’ve learned a great deal, although we haven’t found the best solution yet.”
Learning to focus as much on the journey as the destination
Ershadi recognizes that although developing new solutions is a worthy goal, the innovation process isn’t as much about the destination but the winding roads taken to get there and the discoveries made along the way. For example, she says learning how to apply user journey mapping has proven to be a useful tool in other aspects of her work. Ershadi also has an even greater appreciation for how invaluable the input of the people NRC works with is to developing any sort of solution.
“We learned a lot through talking to and observing refugees, seeing things from their perspective and empathizing with them,” she says. “People don’t wait for you to come up with a solution and share it with them — they find their own ways of doing things. When you spend more time talking to people and observing them, you understand the ways they are doing things and you will find some new solutions you can later test out with them.”
What’s more, Ershadi discovered that change can be achieved through small, incremental steps, not always in a particular order. As she says, it’s important to go through the entire innovation process, which often means testing one idea after another, not all of which will be successful.
“When you test small you fail small, which prevents bigger failures,” Ershadi says. “I’ve learned to do small experimentations — like testing out a questionnaire with my colleagues if I can’t get it to the refugees yet — before scaling something up. I think an important learning from this Fellowship is to talk openly about failure, which is something we don’t often embrace. But when we looked back on our failures we saw they led us somewhere new.”
Ershadi continues working on her project even though she is now an alumna. What’s more, true to the Innovation Fellowship model, Ershadi has been sharing the concept of innovation with her colleagues — as well as other cohorts of Fellows, providing the same sort of support for developing an innovation mindset she received from the Fellows who came before her.
“If we want to bring a change, the main part is to change the mindset and the behaviors, but it can be very challenging to do that,” she says. “I know my own mindset has changed to a very large extent, and I’ve shared this message with people on our team here as much as I can, and I see people who are doing innovations in their day-to-day work as a result.”
Not every Innovation Fellowship project has as much in common as Lovtsova’s and Ershadi’s did, in terms of working to communicate better with refugees. But there is one challenge every single Fellow faces at one point or another during the Program: the sometimes frustrating process of trying one idea after another, even if some of them fail, until they discover the right solution. In a world where failure is often considered a negative outcome, one of the most crucial aspects of the Program is that failure isn’t bad at all, as long as you learn from it. Instead, it’s part of learning and growing — and ultimately arriving at something new and potentially even better than the Fellow might have first imagined.
