Measuring the Inclusivity of DRR and Resilience Programming

What is the humanitarian need?

Many disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience programs have adopted inclusive approaches to co-design interventions alongside affected communities. This is sometimes done through community planning or other mechanisms for consulting communities. However, there remains little analysis on the extent of participation by people with disabilities and the elderly in these fora, and whether their perspectives are meaningfully incorporated in program design and implementation. This innovation seeks to fill the evidence gap by understanding the effectiveness of DRR community design and implementation forums that target people with disabilities and older people among their stakeholders.

What is the innovative solution?

The innovation seeks to create an assessment tool that centres around assessing ‘user experiences’ of people with disabilities and the elderly participating in humanitarian community consultation committees that are intended to inform disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience programming. In order to understand these inclusion mechanisms, it is necessary to employ a data collection method that fully captures the experiences of people with disabilities, observes how the mechanisms play out in practice, and what their effect is on inclusive programming.

To this end, the innovation will develop a community meeting observation tool to record and analyse;

1. The quality and quantity of participation by people with disabilities and the elderly in DRR community planning meetings; and
2. The extent to which the quality and quantity of their participation influence activity effectiveness in addressing community needs.

What are the expected outcomes?

The innovation will initially focus on developing the observational tool. To achieve this milestone, the consortium – leveraging its collective expertise in disability inclusion, humanitarian program implementation, and research – will conduct formative research to better understand how the relevant populations define meaningful participation and the existing barriers. Based on the findings of the research, the consortium will produce a draft tool, which will be circulated among relevant experts for validation and revision. As part of this process, the consortium will also produce a data sharing and storage policy for the innovation, bearing in mind the sensitivities of conducting research in a conflict-affected context such as Somalia.

The consortium will then proceed to pilot the tool in the relevant locations, as well as develop and implement a dissemination plan.