How to get off the high horse: supporting teams hesitant about the CHS

How do you convince someone to do something they don’t want to do, have no time for, and see no value in? How do you break through the barriers? Do you keep trying until you run out of arguments??

Having exhausted all the ‘honest’ methods during the ten years of the Trojan war, Greek warriors resorted to the one that finally worked to get inside the besieged city. The Trojan horse. Greeks managed to get inside the impenetrable walls of Troy by tricking the locals into accepting a gift that looked attractive, interesting, and non-threatening.?

The goals we set to achieve in the aid sector certainly have nothing to do with sneaking forty armed men inside a heavily guarded citadel (although sometimes it feels like that), but with effecting a positive change that is sometimes misunderstood and therefore feared or unwelcome.?

The Trojan horse method has since worked in numerous fields, from astrophysics to sales. It can also be instrumental in encouraging our local partner organisations or busy country teams to genuinely embrace the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) or at least get more consistent about their work on quality and accountability to affected populations.?

Of course, there shouldn’t be any need for Trojan horses, and our teams hardly need convincing about putting the communities they serve at the centre of their programming. But some of our teams are also understaffed, under-resourced, overstretched, uncomfortable about external scrutiny or commitment to a quality and accountability framework, think it’s a tick box exercise, think it’s about compliance only, think it’s overwhelming or too western, don’t speak the language (culturally, linguistically or organisationally), don’t know what they don’t know, do things because they have “always been done this way”, “don’t fix what ain’t broke” etc. So they put up walls.??

How do we get past those walls? How do we make quality and accountability commitments attractive, interesting and non-threatening??

Attractive. What’s in it for them?

It should be an easy one. But what can CHS adherence offer our partners apart from the obvious degree of prestige and growing respect from the donors? According to some of our partners in the Philippines, receiving CHS training and implementation support enabled them to better and more confidently engage in coordination mechanisms and forums where the big charities and UN organisations held the reins and had the loudest voices. For our partners, attending a WG or a cluster meeting became an opportunity to engage and represent the interests of the communities whose reality and needs they knew so well.?

It’s no secret, sometimes, smaller NGOs find it hard to engage in these forums, but for our partners, it wasn’t simply a matter of learning to speak the language of big INGOs, it was about realising how much they had already been doing about quality and accountability, and getting an immediate confidence boost.?

Interesting. How do you connect it with something they like or want?

For those of us who have been on this journey for a while, the CHS doesn’t need advertising, its benefits are clear as day. For many of our development partners, they are less obvious. The Standard seems overwhelmingly western and humanitarian in its language, and it can be hard to genuinely engage with it beyond the formalities of the annual CHS audits. In the spirit of the CHS, Participation Revolution, localisation (you name it), we don’t want to blindly force-feed it to our partners but rather hear from them about their priorities in this area, and start from there.?

Many of our partners are faith-based national NGOs, so writing a paper that looked at quality and accountability from a biblical perspective opened many doors, hearts, and minds for us where the “professional” argument wasn’t nearly as convincing.?

Often, our teams and partners are already very interested in the issues covered by the CHS, even if they are not using its terminology. Sometimes, it's specific aspects of it, like establishing complaint mechanisms. This has inspired us to go “where the energy is” instead of pushing a one-size-fits-all approach with CHS training and implementation.?

In Nigeria and South Sudan, our teams were particularly interested in strengthening their feedback mechanisms and piloting new approaches to collecting information about communities’ perceptions. So we managed to find funding for these pilot projects, learned from them, and replicated the bits that worked in Indonesia during the Tsunami response. Needless to say, these country teams eventually went through CHS certification audits with flying colours. The CHS wasn’t just a lofty framework for them anymore, but something they felt they were a part of.?

Once a team develops an interest in the CHS, it’s important to keep engaging with them, connecting them with others in similar contexts, celebrating their achievements, and being there when they have questions. We are observing a growing interest in the CHS among country teams and partners, and seek to sustain it through regular safe learning spaces where people can come and ask questions, debunk myths and misconceptions, share concerns and learn from the experience of others.?

Non-threatening. All of it is nice, but there is no denying that adopting a new quality and accountability framework can be overwhelming. So is there a way of making it non-threatening??

The language alone can be threatening, and it’s the language that the CHS speaks, not its substance, that tends to seem foreign to some of our teams and partners. So what isn’t foreign? Something that they already know and use. Most of us have our Values, Vision, and Mission statements close to the CHS in spirit. Many even have internal quality and accountability frameworks, standards, commitments, or policies.?

In Tearfund, we already had a set of corporate quality standards that pretty much encompassed the CHS entirely and spoke the more appropriate language for a dual mandate organisation working in a multitude of development contexts. With the adoption of the CHS, we mapped its commitments onto our existing standards, aligned our internal quality indicators with those of the CHS, and then it was business as usual. We don’t want our teams and partners to feel that now they need to follow two accountability frameworks. One is nested within the other, like Russian dolls. So if we get the CHS translated into the language of our organisation, its adoption isn’t so problematic.?

Another issue that our partners and teams face is that they don’t feel comfortable if you leave them alone with a new framework. No matter how relevant, you cannot just introduce it and walk away. In my team, we made it a priority to always be available to answer questions, and provide support, accompaniment, and training on quality and accountability to global, regional, local, and partner teams. We did it on their terms, in alignment with their contexts, language, time zones, and preferred modalities.?

We would have never been able to achieve this agility without the support of our allies, the regional and country quality and accountability focal points whose network we have been steadily growing over the past few years. With their help, we began addressing the sad reality that most teams do not have a dedicated quality role, so our team members and partner staff end up wearing many hats.??

Unsurprisingly, money is always an issue too. There needs to be a separate budget for the quality and accountability training and continuous support, resource development and translation, and embedding the commitments into programme design. If our partners and teams are already hesitant about adopting the framework, we cannot reasonably expect them to bear the financial burden, too.?

Additionally, some aspects of an accountability framework can appear threatening because they are misunderstood. Establishing feedback and complaints mechanisms is often seen as a chore and not as what it can be - a live, real-time monitoring data source. At times, project teams even feel apprehensive about community feedback. It’s only natural to feel defensive and take it personally if your work is criticised. I mentioned the proactive accountability pilot in Nigeria above. As a part of it, feedback collectors would actively seek information about how the communities were feeling about the projects implemented in North-East Nigeria. As expected, this approach helped them receive nearly 100 times more feedback entries. What was not expected, is that over three-quarters of them were not complaints. They were words of appreciation and encouragement. The remaining entries were primarily requests for information and assistance the team could not provide. They referred those community members to the organisations that could. The country team felt encouraged and saw that community feedback wasn’t something to feel nervous about, and their and their partners’ interest in quality and accountability grew ever since.

These are a few aspects to consider while introducing some of the more hesitant of our teams and partners to a more comprehensive approach to quality and accountability or the CHS. We know the Standard is not perfect, does not come with a lot of tools and resources, and its language can alienate some organisations in the sector. It does, however, establish a universal aid standard and needs all of us, especially national NGOs, to remain relevant.?

I’m writing this a month after the launch of the CHS revision. National NGOs must have their say. The Standard is about putting communities at the centre of our work, so we need to hear from those doing this work on the ground.