A Red Cross Red Crescent Guide to Community Engagement and Accountability
This guide presents methods for effectively and systematically engaging communities as a means of improving programme quality and building safer and more resilient communities. Community engagement and accountability (CEA) can be supported by a set of activities that helps put communities at the centre of programming activities. This involves integrating communication and participation throughout the programme cycle of operation.
This document notes that aid organizations often overlook the capacities of local communities in their haste to deliver assistance, or they apply participatory approaches inconsistently, with little impact. The guide provides partners with practical and adaptable guidance on ways to integrate tested communications and participation approaches into any programme, at any point in its cycle and offers tools, templates and examples to support implementation.
The guide also points to the rapidly changing ways that people across the world communicate, and includes ways that local organizations can take advantage of the explosion of new technology and connectivity to better engage with communities, governments, media and each other to improve humanitarian action.
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