Humanitarian Broadcasting in Emergencies - A Synthesis of Evaluation Findings

"This report... focuses mainly on mass communication programming - broadcasting that can reach millions of people when disaster strikes - informing them about what has happened, what to do, how to find missing loved ones and how to protect themselves and their families during the crisis."

This research report is designed to fill a gap around the lack of systematic analysis about mass communication programming involved in getting critical information to and from people affected by disasters. The research question the study sought to answer was: "What are the achievements and limitations of mass-scale humanitarian broadcasts in crisis and how can they best serve people affected by crisis?"

According to this research, since 2012 - when, along with other media and humanitarian actors, BBC Media Action helped to establish the Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) Network - communication support in disaster-affected communities has improved. Thus, this evaluation seeks to develop of a theory of change and identify good practices. This report focuses on a re-analysis of audience research from four interventions of BBC Media Action in the contexts of the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the 2014-2015 response to the Ebola epidemic, the 2014 Gaza conflict, and the ongoing (since the 2011 "Arab Spring" uprisings) Syrian refugee crisis. They are evaluated using "selected criteria from the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD/DAC) and specific media metrics to understand better the strengths and limitations of humanitarian broadcasts in crisis."

• "Chapter 1 provides a brief review of some of the most salient literature and clarifies some of the terminology used in the context of media and communication in humanitarian responses." It distinguishes two types of responses: 1) Communication that seeks to improve the humanitarian aid response. 2) Information and communication that seek to meet the direct needs of people affected by crisis.

• "Chapter 2 reviews the special challenges of carrying out effective research and generating robust evidence from communication interventions in humanitarian crises. These challenges are both ethical (such as ensuring research does no harm and benefits those affected at the time) and practical (such as the difficulty of establishing baseline data or of carrying out focus group discussions during an epidemic). Some of these challenges are common to all humanitarian response work, some of them are specific to evaluating mass media information and communication interventions (such as how to determine what constitutes 'good' information or what is the specific effect of a programme often reaching millions of people)."

• "Chapter 3 outlines BBC Media Action’s research approach to humanitarian responses, and then explains the method used here to synthesise research findings across the four cases studies that form the basis of this report. This synthesis is framed around selected OECD/DAC (Development Assistant Committee, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) evaluation criteria....[T]he focus in crisis communication is on enabling people to understand what has happened and equip them with the information, motivation and confidence to work out for themselves how best to respond in their particular context.... [T]he recognised drivers that media can influence, such as knowledge, attitudes and motivation, are elevated to outcomes....In developing a research design, a combined approach of continuous assessments and evaluative research throughout the different phases of the crisis is used to feed into immediate programme outputs and learning (see Figure 1 [page 21]).... Collaboration is a key part of the approach and conducting primary research assessments are avoided if other agencies are able to add additional information and communication on relevant questions (such as what media beneficiaries have access to) to their assessments." Research design must be context specific. For example, gathering focus groups was not a safe approach in the Ebola crisis, so a short SMS text message survey was used in combination with expert interviews - focus groups were added later.

To enable a level of consistency and synthesis of findings among all BBC Media Action’s evaluations, the same evaluation framework and overarching research questions were used where possible. This framework incorporates metrics and criteria from the OECD/DAC criteria (see Appendix 1), including measures for humanitarian interventions: relevance and appropriateness, connectedness, coherence, coverage, efficiency, effectiveness, and impact. For this research, the following metrics were coded in a qualitative framework: engagement and trust, incorporated as relevance, and effectiveness outcomes, including motivation, confidence, discussion, knowledge, attitudes, and actions.

• "Chapter 4 outlines the four case studies that form the focus of this report: (i) a project providing audiovisual content screened mainly in UNHCR registration centres in Jordan and Lebanon designed to enable Syrian refugees to access humanitarian support and articulate their needs (2013–2014); (ii) a set of radio broadcasts to provide people in Gaza with practical humanitarian information and enable them to access help around the period of the 2014 crisis; (iii) a major communication response to the 2014–2015 West Africa Ebola epidemic, initially through an existing BBC Media Action partnership with 36 radio stations across Sierra Leone, and then with a series of broadcast partnerships reaching across Liberia and Guinea, together with capacity strengthening and emergency preparedness training; and (iv) rapid response broadcasts to the April/May 2015 Nepal earthquakes with the BBC Nepali service and several hundred partner radio stations covering the entire country." These are organised in a chart: Table 2, page 26.

• "Chapter 5 provides a synthesis of these four case studies into a set of findings and insights that can collectively be drawn from the evaluations. Findings show that audiences were able to identify strongly with the characters and topics in the programmes, and that they were relevant and appropriate for a mass audience. They highlight the importance of partnership in further addressing more localised needs and issues. Findings also show that issues of engagement, access and trust are key to the programme’s effectiveness in achieving its outcomes across the identified areas: connecting people to each other; giving people a voice; enhancing discussion and dialogue; positively influencing attitudes; encouraging and motivating people to act; and enhancing knowledge." For example, findings on giving people a voice to share their experiences showed that the practice of representing "people like them" made people feel heard, even on difficult issues that they cared about, and that their concerns were reaching an international community. People appreciated two-way communication possibilities for their own dialogue and wanted more possibilities, as well as online spaces for dialogue on Facebook, as well as direct dialogue with decisionmakers.

• "Chapter 6 suggests an indicative theory of change, informed by these evaluation findings and other literature, for the use of mass communication in humanitarian interventions."

   

  Figure 2 , page 53, and in this summary, there is an outline of the theory of change for the role of mass media interventions in humanitarian responses, based upon the research findings. In addition, five principles of psychosocial care in disasters include (footnotes removed by editor):

1. Promote sense of safety - A sense of safety is encouraged through accurate, neutral and positive information (Hobfoll et al., 2007).
2. Promote calm.
3. Promote sense of collective and self-efficacy - Promoting the belief that self or collective actions are likely to lead to positive outcomes.
4. Promote connectedness.
5. Promote hope.

• "Chapter 7 provides a conclusion making four points in particular. First, that while mass media is effective at reaching large numbers of people with potentially life-saving information across a range of topics, it is less effective at providing more context-specific, localised information that people also need. A combination of mass media and local partnerships is needed to address this. Second, information needs to be practical to be useful, and mass media is most effective at providing practical information that can be universally applied, such as information about the situation, what to do and how to protect yourself and your family, rather than more specific details of what to do in any given context or situation. More localised, context-specific information provision is also important. Third, mass-scale broadcasts are particularly effective at achieving psychosocial impacts, such as helping people feel more connected with others going through the same experience and providing confidence to act in the face of crisis. Finally, crisis exacerbates and heightens existing issues and people make choices about where to get their information based on access, quality, trust and relevance of content. People in crisis place an especially high value on information they can trust, and trust can be lost or gained very quickly. Verifying the trustworthiness of information, which normally involves having strong relationships with local actors and humanitarian responders, is paramount."