What is User-Centred Community Engagement? 

User-Centred Community Engagement (UCCE) is a rapid participatory design methodology that helps field staff better understand the needs and priorities of crisis-affected communities around sanitation facilities. UCCE enables them to co-create relevant and feasible solutions with community members. 

 A number of barriers often impede the uptake of community engagement in humanitarian programme design. These include limited time, limited human and financial resources, and feedback fatigue among communities, among others.

UCCE was designed to help humanitarian field staff overcome these barriers by ensuring that the approach itself and the supporting tools: 

• Are lightweight and easy to fit into the ongoing response tasks

• Are simple to implement for staff who are not trained researchers

• Gather a lot of data in a short time

• Use interactive visual components to overcome literacy barriers

• Produce visual outputs that quickly inform design decisions

User-Centred Community Engagement methodology is built around two core, interconnected components: Interactive Digital Surveys and Co-Creation Sessions. 

• Interactive Digital Surveys are used to rapidly gain broad understanding of existing problems and gaps in the design of sanitation facilities. 

• Insights from the surveys are then explored in more detail during Co-Creation Sessions with community members to uncover root causes of priority problems and collaboratively arrive at a list of ideas for how to best address them.

You can read more about UCCE components and how they are used here and check out the downloadable guidance and resources that we have tested during the pilots for yourself!

How are we planning to scale?

UCCE was first developed by Eclipse and Save the Children UK as a response to the Elrha’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) challenge to develop an innovative community engagement approach to be used in rapid-onset emergencies to inform WASH programming decisions.

Following the UCCE proof of concept from the pilots in Bangladesh (2017) and Iraq (2018) with Save the Children UK, Eclipse Experience has been working with Save the Children UK and Oxfam GB to refine the UCCE methodology and develop the supporting toolkit in order to make it more accessible to a wide range of stakeholders in the humanitarian sector. The refined UCCE methodology and the supporting digital toolkit were successfully piloted in Ethiopia in September 2019. 

We are developing the User-Centred Community Engagement methodology to enable more inclusive and user-centred programming across the humanitarian sector. Over the next three years, we will bring this vision to life by strengthening the UCCE methodology, further developing the open-source UCCE toolkit, and building a strong evidence base on the use of UCCE in a variety of humanitarian contexts and sectors.

1. UCCE methodology revision and ToT development

We learned a great deal from the pilots we implemented in Iraq, Bangladesh and Ethiopia. The first two pilots helped us achieve proof of concept for the use of UCCE in WASH sector to inform the design of child-friendly sanitation facilities. The third pilot in Ethiopia allowed us to better understand the use of the methodology in context and to refine the UCCE methodology and the supporting toolkit, bringing us further along on our journey to scale.

Now, further testing and iteration is needed to ensure that the UCCE methodology is versatile enough to meet different organisations’ needs and that it can be adapted to a range of problems in WASH and other sectors. To achieve this, we are integrating an operational user research component across all forthcoming pilots to monitor implementation and conduct user interviews to further improve the methodology. We are also in active discussions with organisations working in other sectors about adapting UCCE for use in their programmes. This will help us ensure that the methodology meets the needs of field staff and community members alike, contributing to inclusive, rapid and well-informed decision-making on programme design in a range of humanitarian settings.

2. Further development of the UCCE digital toolkit

In 2019, working with Oxfam GB and Save the Children UK, we built the first functional prototype of the UCCE toolkit. The toolkit consists of an open-source Digital Tool and a Web Hub (read about the toolkit here), and will support the scale-up of the UCCE methodology by enabling humanitarian agencies to use it independently in their operations and adapt it to their programme needs.

We tested the prototype with in Ethiopia, and we’re now ready to move its development to the beta testing stage, during which our partners’ staff can use UCCE and the prototype digital toolkit independently and share their experiences in using it with us. 

3. Building a strong evidence base

While the HIF-funded pilots enabled us to collect initial evidence on the effectiveness of the methodology, more evidence is needed to demonstrate the added value that this methodology brings to the humanitarian sector. More specifically, we are looking to gather more evidence in the following areas:

• How does the methodology affect communities’ perception of the aid they receive?

• How does the methodology affect communities’ perception of their engagement in decision making/ ability to influence programme decisions?

• How does the methodology affect the relationship between the communities and the humanitarian organisations?

• Does the methodology lead to more efficient programme design?

• Does the methodology lead to more effective programme outcomes?

We will also work to ensure that the evidence base is reflective of the diversity of humanitarian contexts and sectors. This means testing the methodology in a variety of contexts (e.g., rapid onset, slow onset, protracted crisis, fragile contexts, natural disaster response, refugee response, armed conflict response, urban setting, rural setting), in a variety of sectors (e.g., WASH, shelter, protection, education, livelihoods, health), and in a variety of geographic locations.