Community engagement and accountability

• Accountability and community feedback
• Assessments
• Capacity building and training
• Content creation and messaging
• Coordination and convening
• Deployment of experts
• Research

Putting people affected by crisis at the centre of humanitarian action? It’s about power, and how power is used in practice. Unequal power relations are at the heart of the matter.

Community engagement and accountability (CEA) is a commitment to providing timely and relevant information to people affected by crisis and other humanitarian stakeholders, in languages, formats and via channels that are accessible to all. It is about building and adapting mechanisms for meaningful participation: listening to needs, complaints and feedback, and ensuring that input informs policy and decision making. In practice, services proposed by H2H Network members range from translation to disaster communication, training delivery to complaints and feedback mechanisms. All serve an overarching goal: To better understand, communicate with and be accountable to affected communities.

Fantastic work, allowing us to disseminate information in local languages.

Community engagement specialist, UNICEF.

The H2H Fund’s support in community engagement was very important (…) for information design, such as clarity, legibility and use of plain language.

Communication for development specialist, UNICEF (Ebola response, Democratic Republic of the Congo).