UNHCR Turkey Goes in Search of Improved Communication With Refugees
What’s the best way to learn how refugees want to share information? Ask them.
By Amy Lynn Smith, Writer + Strategist
The Communication with Communities (CwC) team in Turkey was on a mission. With an influx of refugees and asylum seekers since 2011, the once-small operation now finds itself serving the largest number of people of concern, in one country, across the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) — approximately four million, most of them from Syria.
The operation was doing its best to share information with the Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans, Somalis, and other nationals who have sought refuge in Turkey, but it had become an overwhelming undertaking. Refugees were understandably frightened and confused after being uprooted from their home countries, eager to learn about their rights, obligations and the services they’re entitled to in Turkey, but they often struggled to understand the information that was available, if they could find it at all.
It’s not that UNHCR wasn’t communicating with people of concern. One-on-one sessions in person and by phone were already available, along with leaflets, posters, online communication tools — like the UNHCR Turkey “Help” website (http://help.unhcr.org/turkey) and the “Services Advisor” platform (https://turkey.servicesadvisor.org) — and even text messages. The operation also hosted focus group discussions, but often felt the information exchanged on communication preferences and information needs was piecemeal and anecdotal, so it didn’t really help the CwC team identify how to better deliver information.
Ultimately, information wasn’t always reaching the right people in the right ways, and the evolving profile of refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey — with diverse backgrounds, literacy levels, and needs — left significant gaps in the information being shared. Counseling a considerably larger group of refugees and asylum seekers through one-on-one calls or information sessions was no longer the most efficient solution. Even electronic mediums weren’t quite getting the job done. Repeatedly, UNHCR Turkey received appeals for a broader variety of information sources and more two-way communication with UNHCR, agencies, and other providers. Refugees and asylum seekers were eager to understand how to move forward with their lives and they wanted their voices heard.
Recognizing an urgent need to rethink the way they communicated with people of concern, after some discussion the CwC team developed a new idea for approaching this challenge: Ask refugees and asylum seekers exactly what information they need most and how they’d like to receive it.
Fact-Finding to Identify Better Communication Strategies
According to Kasita Rochanakorn, Associate CwC Officer for UNHCR Turkey, they knew they needed two-way communication solutions that were not only more technologically advanced but also incorporated more innovative tools refugees and asylum seekers would find easy to use.
“Once we invested resources in particular channels or tools, we wanted to ensure that they were going to be used by the refugees we’re seeking to target,” she explains. “Just as important, in line with UNHCR’s age-gender-diversity approach, we want to be deliberate about who is actually being targeted and who is able to access the specific channels and tools we’re deploying, because not all channels and tools are for everyone.”
To go on this fact-finding mission, the CwC and Information Management teams created a survey using a needs-based approach. The nationwide survey, which would be conducted by phone, in addition to some focus group discussions, was designed to determine exactly what kinds of two-way communications the broad array of refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey would find most beneficial — their communication needs, capacities, and preferences — so UNHCR could reassess their strategies for exchanging useful information with them.
The survey was broken up to target various sub-groups of refugees, such as Afghan women or Iranian men, to identify trends among particular types of refugees. For Syrian refugees, being the largest population, the survey sampled them based on their geographic location to see if there were regional differences in how they wanted to receive information.
Mapping Out the Best Path for Knowledge-Gathering
To make sure they were getting the right information from the survey, the CwC team spent some time thinking carefully about the kinds of questions that should be asked, making sure all the nationalities of people of concern in Turkey and the languages they speak were represented. Survey questions included basic demographic information, literacy levels, and the kinds of technology services refugees use — such as internet, mobile phones and apps like Facebook — and how they use them to access news and information. There was also a detailed section about whether they knew how to find information they need about services and assistance available from UNHCR Turkey and other organizations, and where they were most likely to look for and find that information.
The team then conducted a pilot, during which they interviewed 177 refugees and asylum seekers, says Samar Aburamadan, a CwC Associate in Ankara. The pilot surveys were designed to make sure UNHCR Turkey was gathering the right information.
After the pilot interviews, the team organized meetings of the colleagues who had conducted the interviews. Having piloted the questions with all the sub-groups of refugees and asylum seekers the team intended to target in the full-scale survey, they were able to confirm that the survey was asking the right questions, in the right way.
UNHCR Turkey hired a team of enumerators — people who would conduct the phone surveys — and before a single survey was conducted they went through a detailed training. The training was led by the CwC team to help them understand the work of UNHCR and CwC and the purpose of the survey. Perhaps even more important, the enumerators were trained in how to appropriately interact with the refugees and asylum seekers they were calling.
“The enumerators had mostly worked as interpreters outside of the humanitarian sector, so many of them had never engaged directly with refugees and asylum seekers,” Rochanakorn says. “So we wanted to make sure they had the awareness and sensitivity of the different challenges refugees might bring up — that was just as important as teaching them how to conduct the survey and enter the data.”
In addition, enumerators were taught how to address questions refugees might ask about situations such as their status. Rather than providing counseling — which the enumerators were not qualified to do — they were told where to refer refugees and asylum seekers to get the information they needed, especially if the situation was urgent.
Embarking on the Quest for Information
Although the core team of enumerators were contractually hired through a recruitment agency, they were considered UNHCR colleagues, seated within UNHCR offices and supervised by CwC team members and other UNHCR colleagues to ensure call and data entry quality. The enumerators were also trained in, and signed, UNHCR’s Code of Conduct, ensuring that they were aware of the organization’s core values and standards. In addition, some UNHCR personnel, including Aburamadan, who is a native Arabic speaker, conducted a portion of the surveys.
Aburamadan says many of the people she surveyed were initially disappointed they were not being called about their status or financial assistance they had requested. But once they learned the survey was intended to help better understand their needs and improve communication tools and support, 94% of the respondents reached agreed to answer the questions. Those with individual queries were referred to personnel who could help them with their concerns.
The survey, conducted by phone between September and November 2018, was carried out with representative samples of 4,978 people of concern from the Syrian (2,726 respondents), Iraqi (738), Iranian (765), and Afghan (749) communities across Turkey. The target respondents were selected randomly from UNHCR’s database and interviewed individually.
One important aspect of the way the survey was conducted was that enumerators would only speak with the person chosen from the database — not just anyone who answered the phone. This allowed people to be heard who might not otherwise feel comfortable speaking up, including people with mental disabilities, older people, or women.
While enumerators strove to be especially sensitive in the way that they posed questions to respondents with specific needs, such as individuals with Down’s syndrome or those with visual impairments, the same survey questionnaire was used for everyone. When UNHCR attempted to reach target respondents who happened to have mental disabilities, many of the family members who picked up the phone initially volunteered to participate in the survey instead and cautioned the enumerators about their family member’s disability. However, the majority were happy to pass the phone onto the target respondent after being told why it was important for UNHCR to interview that person specifically.
Through the survey, UNHCR gathered information such as where the respondents were living, how they received general news — via newspaper or radio, for example — where they found updates on the status of any of their applications, who they trusted for that kind of information, and whether or not they felt well-informed.
An important aspect of the survey had to do with literacy. In Arabic, for example, there are both classical and colloquial versions of the language. One question asked if respondents were able to read a newspaper, which uses the formal classical Arabic, while another asked if they were able to read a short letter from a family member, in colloquial Arabic. Information from the surveys gave UNHCR Turkey vital details about how well people of concern could understand the information they distribute, which is typically written in classical Arabic.
Lessons Learned
The vast majority of respondents said they felt uninformed about their rights, obligations, and assistance available to them in Turkey. Women tended to feel less informed than their male counterparts. Most respondents also did not know how to issue complaints to UNHCR or partner agencies, although knowledge levels varied widely among nationalities, with Iranians feeling most aware and Syrians feeling least aware. Although a majority of respondents said they received most of their information from informal sources, such as family and friends, they said they consider UN agencies, NGOs, the Turkish government, and public institutions the most trusted sources of information.
“It’s concerning that 60 percent of respondents felt very or moderately uninformed,” Rochanakorn says. “But what’s interesting is that during focus group discussions we carried out in 11 provinces with different samples of refugees, they initially said they felt uninformed, but when we asked more specific questions like, ‘Do you know how to enroll your children in school?’ they said yes. So perhaps we missed a trick in the survey by not asking a lot of follow-up questions, to dig into whether people felt uninformed or were actually uninformed, which is not the same thing.”
Rochanakorn adds that they gathered a lot of supplementary data around these kinds of questions through the focus groups, and have also encouraged partners — such as other organizations with programs intended to communicate with refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey — to look more closely at these questions when they carry out their own surveys on information-sharing. This demonstrates how important it is to differentiate between refugees’ perceptions of being informed and their actual level of understanding of information being shared with them, so UNHCR can shape future information exchanges accordingly.
The survey data is proving very useful in improving how UNHCR Turkey shares information with refugees and asylum seekers. For instance, the data confirmed the widespread use of technological and digital tools among people of concern, and the need for UNHCR and its partners to make better use of these resources in communications.
Because the strongest desire expressed by respondents was to hear more from UNHCR Turkey, the operation is taking steps to create additional communication channels. For example, the operation has created a Facebook page where refugees and asylum seekers can engage in two-way conversations about their needs, concerns and questions, and get information on their rights and obligations. Improving reporting mechanisms for people with low literacy skills is another avenue the operation is exploring, to create ways for people who can’t write to get answers to their questions. The operation is also keen to maintain ways to communicate with people of concern who do not have internet access, such as enhancing its telephone counseling line.
To address the literacy gap the survey identified, Rochanakorn says UNHCR Turkey is starting to produce written materials that are easier for people with lower literacy skills to read, and looking into incorporating more graphic icons that guide people to the information that is most relevant to them so they don’t have to read every document in its entirety. Videos, posters and other graphic materials will also be used more widely in the future.
“Through the survey, we learned that things like videos, Facebook posts, and other ways of communicating in less formal language will be very helpful to people seeking information,” Aburamadan adds. “We also learned that people don’t always know which UNHCR website to visit for the information they need, so that’s another area we are working on improving.”
UNHCR Turkey will continue investigating new channels for getting information to the communities they serve, especially because communication preferences differ based on nationality, gender, and age.
“This survey process has been a very important milestone in the advancement of two-way communication processes and initiatives,” Rochanakorn says. “Our counseling line was already responding to thousands of calls a week, but we’re confident that what we learned from the survey will help us find more innovative ways to communicate with the diverse range of refugees and asylum seekers we serve even more efficiently and effectively moving forward.”
Interested to learn more about Information and Communication needs assessments? Visit our assessment overview page here, and an example of an online assessment is available here.
