In March 2023, funded by the H2H Network’s H2H Fund and supported by UK aid - from the British people, Ground Truth Solutions launched a project to understand the extent to which the humanitarian response in Türkiye is accountable to people’s needs, priorities, and expectations. This project also aims to uncover how aid can be more responsive to the unfolding needs of the affected population in Türkiye, and how international actors can effectively support and engage with the localised response.

Over the last few decades, it has been recognised that adaptation approaches are more likely to succeed if they are rooted in local knowledge and empower communities to make their own decisions. However, research conducted by GTS and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in 2021 shows that the fine aspirations found in the documentation to engage and empower vulnerable communities are rarely matched by the reality on the ground.

Cash-based programming has been a key component of the humanitarian response in Ukraine since the escalation of the conflict into a full-scale war in February 2022. In 2022 alone, 5.6 million people were reached with multi-purpose cash assistance (MPCA), making it the largest humanitarian cash assistance programme in history.

There has arguably never been a more critical time to actively listen to the voices of women and girls in Afghanistan, and yet opportunities to do so are limited, and complicated. The Rapid Gender Analysis (RGA) conducted by CARE Afghanistan from June-July 2021 indicate that women’s exclusion from decision-making spaces extends to humanitarian assistance, especially since the ban on women working for national and international NGOs, which has left little opportunities to engage with women.

The escalation of the war on 24 February 2022 in Ukraine provoked one of the biggest humanitarian crises Europe has seen in the last decades. More than 17 million people need aid and almost 14 million people have been reached with humanitarian and governmental assistance as of December 2022.

In 2022, we partnered with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) in collaboration with the secretariat of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), to together make sure community feedback was spurring necessary reform where it is needed: right at the top.  

The Cash Barometer launched in CAR in 2020 in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where we sought to capture the voices of market traders and CVA recipients in the context of the developing crisis. Since then, CVA significantly scaled up in CAR, making it even more critical than ever to ensure the voices of CVA recipients are heard.

Ground Truth Solutions has been tracking the experiences of aid recipients in Somalia and Somaliland since 2017. In this time, cash and voucher recipients have consistently requested more involvement and consultation from aid actors than they receive.

In late 2019, we launched the Cash Barometer in Nigeria with a survey of CVA recipients in Borno State. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, we adapted our approach to explore how CVA recipients, humanitarians, and financial service providers perceived the economic impact of the pandemic.

In collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP), Ground Truth Solutions explored the lived experiences or user journeys of women receiving mobile money in Somalia.

Lack of funding, the COVID-19 pandemic, and attacks on health care make Afghanistan’s health system fragile. Community perceptions on healthcare can inform better health programming.

Ground Truth Solutions aims to provide Rohingya and local communities with a way to express their views and give feedback.

In 2020, we collected feedback from internally displaced people and non-displaced people on their experience with the humanitarian aid they received over the past six months and the impact COVID-19 was having on their lives.

This project aims to provide a check and balance on the endless rhetoric around ‘putting people at the centre’ by ensuring the views of crisis-affected Haitians are forefront in local decisions and global discussion.

The 34 camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh are some of the most densely populated areas in the world, housing some 860,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled their native country to seek protection from persecution and violence. Fears of a deadly coronavirus outbreak prompted a swift government-issued lockdown in March 2020, with humanitarians having to limit operations to essential services only.

As the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, we knew that listening to community feedback about what worked and what didn’t would be more important than ever when humanitarians, health workers, governments, and others came together to combat the virus.

With experience in designing simple and sustainable feedback systems, and the ability to train NGOs in how to best implement them, Ground Truth Solutions supported local Afghan NGOs in building the tools, skills and experience necessary to run systematic feedback mechanisms independently.