Research consultant

Understanding the perceptions of aid recipients to support an improved humanitarian response in Ukraine and surrounds

Duration: 10 months

FTE: 50-100% (negotiable based on availability)

Location: Vienna, Austria, with travel to Ukraine and surrounding countries

Reports to: Senior Programme Manager

The consultancy

Ground Truth Solutions is looking for a consultant to facilitate data collection, dialogue and analysis with people affected by crisis in Ukraine and surrounding countries, as a critical part of a project to ensure people’s perceptions, priorities and feedback are informing the UK-funded regional humanitarian response.

About Ground Truth Solutions (GTS)

Our mission is to ensure that people affected by crises have a say in humanitarian action, from individual aid projects to global humanitarian reform. To achieve this, we collect feedback from people at the receiving end of aid. We challenge and support aid agencies to use this feedback to optimise their work. We help agencies to understand and communicate the resulting insight back to affected communities. We work with policymakers, governments, and aid agencies to bring about the change we want to see.

Our project

GTS will support the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC) and its implementing partners to exemplify their Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) commitments and listen to Ukrainian and host community voices and improve programming in real time, by enabling a better understanding of the perceptions, priorities and feedback of aid recipients and their communities.

Objectives

• Catalyse better quality and more adaptive programming, with response-wide strategies being shaped by collective community feedback
• Ensure community perceptions and priorities form a significant and tangible element in DEC’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts in Ukraine and surrounding countries
• Provide evidence of DEC partners collectively responding to feedback and adapting accordingly
• Provide a model for a management response combining both the supply (progress toward CHS commitments) and demand (people’s feedback) elements of accountability
• Enable DEC partners to become accountability champions across the response, catalysing broader cultural change, and providing lessons learned for future DEC-funded deployments

Working with local partners, GTS will use (multiple rounds of) quantitative and qualitative data collection to track the perceptions of aid recipients in DEC areas of operation. Quantitative survey work will help reveal the way people see the quality and relevance of programme activities, the character of aid worker behaviour, and the extent to which affected people feel they have influence over – or even the chance to participate in – humanitarian activities. Qualitative inquiry will dig deeper, exploring why certain quantitative findings look the way they do, and helping community members to co-create recommendations that, coupled with ongoing M&E. These rounds of data collection, backed up by deeper qualitative inquiry and discussion with affected people and service providers, will serve two purposes: first, to confirm baseline information, and second to track how things pan out over time. In both instances, the feedback data will provide the spur and rationale for making course corrections.

We will also engage in dialogue on a continuing basis with community members, local and international humanitarian responders and the DEC team about how best to respond and adapt to the feedback. The idea is not to provide a final evaluation of programme success – although the data will be a valuable input into the evaluative process – but to help responders better tailor their work, approach, and participation techniques to local priorities during programme implementation.

Scope of work

The consultant will work with our project team and perform the following tasks:

• Develop communication plan with GTS team, including regular check-ins
• Support in designing research methodology and contextualising research tools (e.g. sampling strategy, survey tools, interview guides)
• Support on the identification and training of data collection entities
• Support on testing the data collection tools
• Oversee data collection
• Facilitate qualitative discussions with Ukrainians affected by crisis
• Support on the contextualisation of data analysis and dialogue with communities, civil society, and humanitarian actors
• Participate in training sessions, events, and other discussions to share our findings
• Support in report writing and development of advocacy, policy, and information-sharing tools

Relevant experience and skills

• A strong and proven background in international development, community engagement, and/or humanitarian action in the context of Ukraine.
• Proven research skills (e.g. through prior publications), including in both quantitative and qualitative research methods.
• Excellent analytical and reporting skills.
• Fluency in written and spoken Ukrainian, Russian, and English.
• Experience working with humanitarian organisations and/or engagement with Ukrainian civil society

Timeline

A detailed work plan will be agreed upon at the beginning of the consultancy. It is anticipated the most tasks will be completed in May 2023.