When people flee natural disasters or conflict and capture the fickle attention of the media, why is it always officials and aid workers who grab the limelight? In our rush to deliver help why do we ignore the voices of the displaced? How can humanitarian agencies learn to listen when planning responses to their needs?

A joint Oxfam / Save the Children study reports on an ongoing initiative in Sri Lanka to interview displaced people, document their perceptions, listen to their criticisms and involve them in fine-tuning relief and rehabilitation programmes. The Listen to the Displaced (LTD) approach argues the need, even amidst the chaos of immediate emergencies, to move from top-down responses to interventions which take account of community structures and cultural patterns - particularly gendered division of labour.

LTD began in 1996 as little more than an attempt to summarise how internally displaced persons (IDPs) respond to questions from an external check-list of themes. LTD now allows increasingly large numbers of participants to set the agenda for discussion. Agencies are more conscious of the need to account to their constituents and have a better understanding of the coping mechanisms of displaced people. Women, children and disabled people are more confident in the public sphere: a maintenance of anonymity has emboldened IDPs to discuss issues of displacement, aid, conflict and peacemaking freely despite an authoritarian environment.

Through dissemination of summary reports in English, Sinhala and Tamil, IDPs have been able to represent their opinions and needs to donors, the military and civil service, local NGOs, expatriate aid workers and the general public exposed to negative misconceptions about people on the other side of Sri Lanka’s politico-ethnic divide.

Agencies now recognise the need to:

• include cooking utensils (made from clay and coconut trees so that they cannot be remade into weapons) in household relief packages
• provide children with hurricane lamps, both to help them to study and to allay fears of the dark in areas of tension
• provide tools, seeds and credit to agricultural communities
• address women’s needs for menstrual cloth and private bathing places.

Among the challenges to further expansion of the LTD process are:

• Getting government officials involved: how can they be coaxed into becoming team members, rather than authority figures expecting to be heeded?
• Some researchers need to learn humility and a desire to learn from participants.
• Researchers need to be able to spot the symptoms of assessment fatigue in over-questioned populations.
• Local NGOs with limited experience of research and participatory methodologies need ongoing support to reinforce good practice.
• More determined advocacy to ensure that recommendations are not just made but are taken on board by policymakers.

Source(s):
‘Listening to the displaced: action research in the conflict zones of Sri Lanka’, Oxfam Working Papers, Oxfam GB, by Kerry Demusz 2000 Full document.
Listening to the displaced: analysis, accountability and advocacy in action by Simon Harris Full document.

Funded by: Department for International Development, UK

id21 Research Highlight: 23 November 2001

Further Information:
Helen Bowers
Oxfam Publishing
274 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 7DZ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1865 311 311
Fax: +44 (0)1865 313 925
Contact the contributor: publish@oxfam.org.uk

Oxfam GB

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'Displaced Communities and the Reconstruction of Livelihoods in Eritrea' from WIDER

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