Assistance Delivery

Protection of the emergency-affected population is one of the key aspects of humanitarian assistance. This process indicator developed by DG ECHO therefore focuses on monitoring the extent to which the project beneficiaries felt that the provided assistance was delivered in a safe, accessible, accountable, and participatory manner.

DG ECHO has prepared detailed guidance on the use of this indicator (see below). To determine the indicator’s value, it recommends the following steps:

1) Design a representative sample of the project beneficiaries. ECHO requires you to ensure that the sample adequately represents the community subgroups (in terms of gender, age, disability and diversity). At the same time, it acknowledges that having a stratified sample representing all the subgroups might be too demanding and therefore considers random sampling as an acceptable option (while recommending that the margin of error for any sub-group should not be more than 10 percentage points).

2) Include eight mandatory and seven follow-up questions recommended by ECHO in your post-distribution monitoring (or any other) questionnaire. They relate to the four core elements of protection mainstreaming:

   - Prioritize safety & dignity, and avoid causing harm (marked as “SDH” in ECHO's guidance)

   - Meaningful Access (“MEA”)

   - Accountability (“ACC”)

   - Participation and empowerment (“PEM”)

The mandatory and follow-up questions, including answer options, are provided in ECHO's guidance. ECHO allows the partners to slightly rephrase the questions to make them easier to understand in the local context; however, their meaning must stay the same. Since several of the questions are incorrectly phrased in a leading manner (e.g. “Are you satisfied with the assistance provided?”), IndiKit recommends rephrasing them so that they do not lead the respondent to a certain answer (e.g. “To what extent were you satisfied with the assistance provided?”).

3) Conduct individual interviews with the project beneficiaries, following the sampling strategy designed in point 1. As ECHO highlights, the indicator's value is not what matters the most. The key focus is on identifying any protection-related issues across the four assessed core principles of protection mainstreaming throughout the project. Therefore, the enumerators need to pay maximum attention to the follow-up questions, as they allow you to understand why people did not feel safe and what measures need to be taken.

4) To calculate the indicator’s value, the ECHO guidance recommends that for each question you:

       - sum up the number of respondents who chose “YES COMPLETELY" and "MOSTLY YES” for all questions except the question MEA 2; for MEA 2, sum up the number of respondents who chose “NOT REALLY” and “NOT AT ALL”; then

       - divide this number by the total number of responses to the question, excluding people where the option “NO ANSWER” was selected; then

       - multiply the resulting number by 100 to convert it to a percentage.

  - Next, calculate the average of the percentages for the eight mandatory questions to get the final value of the indicator.

5) It is recommended that in addition to reporting on the overall value of the indicator, you also:

  - report individually on the percentage of respondents who provided positive answers to the eight mandatory questions

  - disaggregate this by the key subgroups (e.g. based on gender, age group, disability), so that you can identify whether any of the subgroups faced more protection issues than others

  - report on the key protection risks that you identified and on the corrective measures that were taken (to do so, you can take advantage of ECHO's Excel template provided in the guidance)

Disaggregate the overall value of the indicator by gender, age groups, and disability.

1) When using this indicator, take maximum advantage of the guidance provided by ECHO (see below). While the document is relatively long, the guidance it provides is useful. Once you have initiated using this indicator, it will be easy for you to continue doing so.

2) According to the ECHO guidance, the indicator is a process indicator rather than an outcome indicator. This means that the difference between the value at the beginning (baseline) and the end of the action (target) is not the main focus. The key focus is ensuring that sufficient attention is given to all four elements of protection mainstreaming throughout the implementation of the project and that corrective measures are identified and implemented. The overall purpose of the indicator is to have a positive impact on the way the assistance is delivered during the project. That is why the corrective measures taken are the most important aspect of this indicator.

3) ECHO requires the implementing partners to use the indicator throughout the project implementation (e.g. after each round of distribution of assistance) rather than exclusively at the end of the project, as it aims to identify corrective actions to be taken promptly to improve the quality of programming. The first survey round should be conducted shortly after the beneficiaries start receiving assistance, to help identify any pre-existing issues.

4) The ECHO guidance explains that when a project is the first of its kind in the area, no baseline needs to be set (i.e. it can be put at zero). When a project is a follow-up of a previous project where the indicator was used, it is possible to use the endline value of this indicator as a baseline value for the new one, provided no major changes have occurred.

5) In some contexts, enumerators might encounter people who experienced physical or sexual violence related to accessing or using the provided assistance. Collecting information about such incidents is sensitive and poses risks to the respondents as well as to the enumerators. Take advantage of IndiKit's Rapid Guide to Collecting Survey Data on GBV (see below) to know how to minimize the risk of any harm and ensure the desired quality of collected data.