Experimenting and learning with Catholic Relief Services in Haiti

Organizations supporting local development and responding to humanitarian needs agree on the need to improve the quality and use of feedback data in program decision-making. There is less agreement, however, on what factors ensure quality and consistent utilization of feedback data. Recurring questions continue to pop-up in inter-agency meetings, learning events and peer-to-peer discussions:

• What are the critical factors that enable the use of feedback data?
• What influences managers’ perception about the utility and validity of feedback data?
• How should feedback data be presented in order to stimulate use in decision-making?
• Who needs to hear what, in what format, with what frequency?
• How can organizations sustain demand for feedback from decision-makers at different levels?

Between April and September 2016, CDA Collaborative Learning Projects and CRS Haiti will study the Cacao Value Chain Project program managers’ perception and use of community feedback. Catholic Relief Services is interested to learn how feedback influences project direction. With CDA’s support, CRS Haiti Accountability team will test improved methods for feedback collection, aggregation and presentation to management.

With funding from Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Root Capital, CRS aims to revitalize the cocoa sector by supporting small cocoa farm producers and cooperatives with new techniques and skills to gain access to the global market. CRS is working with 4,000 small cocoa producers in Grand’Anse on four components:

1. Improving productivity and natural resource management.
2. Adding value through improved product and process.
3. Strengthening institutional capacity of coops to ensure sustained long-term growth.
4. Improving knowledge management and communication strategy.

Currently, Catholic Relief Services hosts a toll-free phone line and a locally based community facilitator to listen to cocoa farmers. Feedback provided in face-to-face conversations is not always recorded or tracked by the field staff. Without documentation and aggregated analysis, feedback does not have the level of influence in programmatic decisions and in course corrections that CRS had initially intended. The aggregated analysis could also be shared with implementing partners and IDB for higher level learning and strategy development. CDA is supporting the CRS Haiti Accountability team to develop and apply new approaches for 1) face-to-face feedback collection and documentation which is currently the preferred method for farmers; 2) aggregation of feedback data from several existing feedback channels; and 3) visual presentation of feedback data to management.

When CDA visited CRS’s Port-au-Prince office in April to gather perception data from program managers across the country team, we had conversations with managers, community liaison officers and M&E staff to understand and document their experiences and needs regarding feedback collection and use in programming decisions. A survey of managers indicated a strong support, in principle, for use of community feedback to inform decisions. Managers also provided concrete suggestions for how to organize and present feedback data in concise manner and their preferred frequency for such summary reports.

While this information was useful, we know that the feedback we need most will come from conversations with farmers themselves. Therefore, the ICT4D team at CRS Haiti is developing a user-friendly form to capture feedback during community visits this summer. By early September, we will measure and document changes in managers’ perceptions of the validity and reliability of community feedback. We will also test our working assumption that timely and user-friendly feedback summary reports increase decision makers’ demand for and use of feedback data. We expect to see increased demand from decision makers for feedback summaries (i.e. making community feedback review a standing agenda item; requests for analysis of community feedback on specific issues, etc) and several documented examples of feedback utilization in decision-making.