A locally informed humanitarian response: Insights from Ukraine

Humanitarian reform
Written By GTS

An unexploded ordnance stands partly buried in the road outside a building in Ukraine. Photo: Алесь Усцінаў

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.

Ground Truth Solutions, funded by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), in partnership with the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) and Open Space Works Cooperative set out to talk to crisis-affected people in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Moldova through quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews. We target people who received or need aid on how they perceive the quality of the response and representatives of civil society organisations and local aid providers to learn more about their work. By asking their views, priorities, and expectations of how aid is provided, we work towards meeting two objectives:

1.     To feed critical perceptions into response coordination in real-time.

2.     To understand the quality of the response from the viewpoint of aid recipients and people in need.

For the first round of data collection, we implemented computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) in Ukraine in partnership with KIIS from September to October 2022. We spoke with 2,023 people and asked their views on access to assistance, aid seeking behaviour, information access, knowledge of feedback mechanisms, and fairness.

These quantitative interviews were followed by qualitative focus group discussions and key informant interviews with crisis-affected people, representatives of civil society organisations, as well as local volunteers and aid providers. In these conversations, conducted between October and December 2022 by Open Space Works Cooperative, we aimed to get a deeper understanding of how people interact with humanitarian aid, what their recommendations for improvements are, and how local aid providers and the international community can collaborate better on providing humanitarian aid.

The findings from Ukraine were presented in multiple working groups and discussed in two workshops held in December 2022 and January 2023. As a follow up we will conduct another round of quantitative data collection early 2023 to understand how people’s perceptions have changed over time. Our ongoing aim is to ensure the humanitarian response is informed and influenced by the views of affected people and local responders.  

In Poland, Romania, and Moldova we are working with Open Space Works Cooperative and conducting a round of quantitative web-surveys and qualitative user-journey research to better understand the barriers Ukrainian refugees have to accessing aid, their journey experience, priorities, and how they perceive the quality of assistance available. We expect to have all data by April and published by May 2023.

GTS
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