Starting to Listen

We would like to share our learning around conducting five local stakeholder meetings to finalize project sites;

Mixing the participants’ backgrounds

• It is necessary to incorporate women in the key local stakeholder meetings and encourage them to attend along with men to ensure the suitability of the selected sites. Women and men showed different needs and concerns about their respective locations.
• Selecting a mixture of backgrounds and experiences was important to enrich the discussions about the selected sites.

Holding the meeting

1. Organizing the place of the stakeholder meeting as close as possible to the participant’s location will help ensure their attendance. Similarly, establishing flexibility of timing is important for the difficulty of gathering key people in one meeting. Conducing one-to-one meetings is another option but requires more time and effort.
2. Preparing a map of the proposed targeted areas helps stakeholders to better visualize the areas and makes it easier for them to select the more specific locations.
3. Communication skills are very important to convince key local stakeholders of the importance of their attendance and the project’s benefit to their areas. Having a brochure ready to share with meeting attendees will help to better explain the project’s idea.
4. Explaining the project criteria at the beginning of the meeting is important to keep the participants focused on selecting the most appropriate areas.
5. Ensuring DRR team members are attending an orientation about the project prior to conducting the community meetings will help to deliver the right message of the project for the key stakeholders.

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GRRAM’s next steps are to select the 200 women from the identified target areas to conduct VCA assessment. We encourage anyone to advise the GRRAM team where we should focus best practices to implement DRR projects in urban conflict-prone areas.