Resources: Case Studies - Assessment

Camp Terrain Accra is one of the biggest camps in Haiti’s capital, Port au Prince, with around 25,000 residents. It was also one of the few to have a professional international camp manager supported by a major NGO – the American Refugee Committee (ARC). The following story about listening to camp residents came to the attention of the camp manager through a chance conversation with a national staff member who had worked on the project at the time.

A few weeks into the cholera outbreak, the Haitian Red Cross (HRC) psychosocial section organised an initial series of nine discussion and awareness-raising groups on cholera in four earthquake-affected areas where they were already working (1). These groups were originally held to increase community awareness and address the psychosocial aspects of cholera (such as stigmatisation and grief), and were not set up with research purposes.

For the first time in an emergency, media development NGO, Internews, began funding a research unit from the earliest days of their response in Haiti. The research department began as a way of mapping and understanding the best tools to improve communication with affected communities, in order to strengthen their daily humanitarian news programme Enformasyon Nou Dwe Konnen – ENDK (Kreyol for ‘News You Can Use’).