Third-party monitoring in northern Nigeria
Photo: Anouk Delafortrie/ECHO/EC
Since 2018, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)-funded North East Nigeria Transition to Development (NENTAD) programme has provided regional assistance for people affected by crisis including in education, treatment of malnutrition, food, and protection to the populations affected by the ongoing armed conflict in the states of Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa.
In 2020, Ground Truth Solutions worked with IMPACT Initiatives to carry out Third Party Monitoring (TPM) of NENTAD’s aid delivery, through independent assessments among service recipients. GTS advised on how to leverage light-touch surveys as a way for intended beneficiaries to assess the services provided and share their experiences of the programmes.
GTS also conducted Accountability in Action Assessments, which helped implementing partners understand the extent to which their programmes were living up to Accountability to Affected People (AAP) principles. We did this by bringing together data from multiple sources – senior partner staff, frontline staff, and of course – affected people themselves. The content of the Assessments was largely aligned to the Core Humanitarian Standard and included the relevance and quality of aid, relationships between providers and intended beneficiaries, as well as outcomes – including community resilience – from programmes. By bringing together different constituent groups on the same set of issues we managed to learn more about what was working and what wasn’t, as well as provide concrete and contextualised recommendations for improvement.
The Resulting Assessment reports were shared with both partners and FCDO, and a series of discussion and learning events were held. While the project was impacted by Covid restrictions and the requirement to move to remote data collection, the process was well-received, with partners and FCDO reporting the data and resulting discussions were incredibly helpful in both aiding understanding and identifying next steps.
We hope to conduct similar Accountability in Action Assessments in the future and any agencies wishing to learn more about them, and how they can help your adherence to the CHS should contact Kai Hopkins on kai@groundtruthsolutions.org
