Feedback Day: a simple, agile method for taking into account feedback from crisis-affected people

The objective of the RESILAC project is to support the long-term socio-economic recovery of vulnerable people in Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad. It is a large-scale project that adopts a multi-country, multi-sector and multi-stakeholder approach to reinforce the ‘triple nexus’ between humanitarian aid, development and peace. In an unstable regional context where there is a high level of insecurity, this approach requires a capacity to adapt that ‘traditional’ project implementation and management struggle to provide.

Given the limits of ‘traditional’ methods and approaches, the RESILAC project has developed an agile process, called Feedback Day, where crisis-affected people have a central role, thus increasing the relevance and ownership of the response. This involves a mixture of ‘outcome harvesting’ and real-time evaluation. It is an iterative evaluation exercise carried out internally by project staff. The feedback of crisis-affected people about the quality and impact of the response is taken into account, and adjustments are made ‘in real time’.

Having been introduced a year ago, Feedback Day is appreciated not only by the project stakeholders, but also by staff, who see it as a ‘new’ way of working with the population and achieving collective results.

© Photo: Espen Røst / Bistandsaktuelt