Covid-19 response

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.

Affected people were bombarded with often hard-to-grasp information and subjected to new

regulations restricting movement, travel, and daily routines. Our initial efforts sought to learn about peoples’ trust in the response, the fairness of support, and the profound economic impact. We then set out to share what we learned with responders and policymakers.

We did this in countries where GTS was already active, or had previously been: Iraq, Uganda, Syria, Somalia, and Bangladesh – countries scoring high on the INFORM risk index and low on the Universal Health Care index. We knew we would need to be flexible with our methods, since face-to-face data collection was all but impossible.

This project was one of our most interesting and most challenging to date. We’re grateful to the H2H Network for supporting our work with such flexibility and encouraging us to innovate, realising that if remote  methodologies were to work, they had to be tailored to context. We have worked hard to ensure that colleagues and peers benefitted not only from the data, but from what we learned in the process.

At a time when more and more agencies are turning to various forms of perception tracking, we feel this is more important than ever. We plan to make lessons learned from this project a sustainable source of knowledge for responders by continuing to track perceptions throughout on how Covid-19 is influencing ongoing humanitarian responses. Most of our survey work will shift to themes related to economic impact, vaccine uptake and overall response effectiveness, reflecting what communities have told us is most important to them.