“But despite the presence of the COVID-19, I couldn't give up. I couldn't give up everything because in life everything cannot be rosy. There are ups and downs and you have to know how to adapt.” Alima Traore owns a business in Cote d’Ivoire, neatly captures today’s inspiration: how we cope with ups and downs.
The last 7 months have been a roller coaster no one could have predicted. We’ve had amazing success—working with more than 24 million people in 69 countries to respond to COVID-19. Women we work with, communities, partners, and CARE staff have shown amazing courage and ingenuity on so many fronts.
Let’s be clear though: not everything worked. It may seem counter-intuitive to find inspiration in all the actions we want to change, but one of the things I love about working at CARE is our drive to constantly improve our work, now and in the future. That’s why we have a podcast series and a research project on learning from failure. The fact that we are ALREADY learning and adapting—and have been for months—inspires me.
We asked CARE’s teams responding to COVID-19 what they would change if they could do it all over again. With the benefit of hindsight, 7 months into the crisis, what have we learned that we can implement now, and that we use for next time? As ever, CARE staff show remarkable learning, adaptability, and ambition to change the world.
What would we change?
- Build as many mechanisms to listen to others as to share our messages. Many countries said that they would start much earlier to build ways for communities to share what they need with CARE. That includes feedback and accountability mechanisms—like hotlines, phone interviews, text messages, and suggestion boxes. At the beginning of the crisis, we focused on mass media as a way to push messages about COVID out to people we work with. We learned that any time we do that, we need to have a way for people to share back with us.
- Build genuine partnerships as early as possible—start now, before the next crisis. Do more with partners and in finding the right partnerships—either inside government or out, local or national. So much of the work in COVID-19 is happening with and through partners that we need to spend more time building partnerships where other actors can tell us what they need most.
- Invest more in communications material and get them out faster. This encompasses communications materials to talk about COVID-19, broadening the scope of COVID-19 materials to talk about GBV and gender equality sooner, and building better advocacy and influencing materials sooner.
- Integrate COVID responses more holistically across the portfolio quicker many countries talked about needing to move past the immediate health crisis to plan for long-term effects faster. That means investing more in food security, livelihoods, or other responses beyond immediate health. It also means thinking immediately how EVERY project will adapt to the crisis, rather than just a few.
- Assess faster and iterate. We would do more to get a quick read of the situation, and frequently update our understanding so we could see how issues were evolving. That requires embracing imperfection and sticking to the principles of the Rapid Gender Analysis for all of our needs assessments.
What are we doing about it?
- Investing more in 2-way communication with project participants and communities, and do a lot more work to learn from them as we go and adapt to meet their needs and to design work with communities and community leaders. Burundi is a great example, where they not only shared text messages with thousands of women in VSLAs, they also had a number women could text back with questions, comments, and needs. The team reviewed that data to shape their responses starting in April.
- Working on more local partnerships. Check out a variety of podcasts from experts around CARE and out partners talking about how we’re working to get better at this. In one episode, Tatiana Bertolucci for Latin America talks about work in Brazil. Victoria Palmer and Puji Pujiono talk about work in Indonesia—before an emergency and after crisis hits. Women’s Rights Organizations talk about what they want to see from CARE in this recording. In another episode, Daniel Almeida talks about working with domestic workers rights movements.
- Collecting rapid and frequent data. Bangladesh and Nigeria have already done a second round of their RGA to understand how the crisis is evolving. Haiti, Malawi, and Nigeria are doing several rounds of rapid SMS surveys, to inform rapid program adaptation and advocacy. Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania will be joining them.
- Working more on food and livelihoods. When our analyses started showing us the full scope of the food and financial crisis that was coming along with COVID, we started finding more ways to reach people who needed support to eat and pay their bills. Half of our country teams are using cash as a response, up from 10% in March. 19% of countries are focusing on livelihoods (up from 6%) and 59% on food (up from 13%).