When an emergency strikes, be it natural disaster or man-made, organisations working on the ground, together with the national authorities, rush to respond. Their actions are orientated towards getting in supplies, arranging logistics, and ensuring programmes such as Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Health, Shelter and Nutrition can deliver on their commitments. Few people realise that two-way communication, i.e. the sharing and receiving of information, with disaster affected communities should be and can be a part of humanitarian response and is, in itself, not only a cross-cutting function but also a form of aid.
Communication is essential to successful emergency programming in many ways: it can alert the population about the disaster and raise awareness on potential threats, thus mitigate risk; if it is twoway, it can improve programming by being more needs-based; if done well and effectively, it can improve coverage overall and at the same time reach more vulnerable people; it can support the coordination effort by creating the space and the means for organisations and communities to work and talk together; and it can be an important and effective tool in addressing the psycho-social needs of a population who have experienced a disaster first hand.
Thus, communication with affected populations is aid.
The aim of the message library is to have a set of generic, easily accessible multi-sectoral messages targeted at crisis-affected populations. The message library includes alerts, advice on how to mitigate risk, what to do in the absence of any assistance and prompts for messages on programmatic interventions/services available. The library is not designed to be a ‘rip and read’ resource – instead it should be used as a reference for those working in emergency situations about what can be shared with affected communities during and after disasters be they natural or man-made. It is not an exhaustive list. As this is a dynamic tool, messages can be added, edited, and revised at any point, should the need arise.
The message library is designed for sudden onset emergencies, but it can also be a useful tool in protracted crises.
The library has several intended uses:
In order to achieve point ‘a’, the library will need to be accessed by as many people on the ground as possible. It is also advisable that humanitarian organisations, together with their national counterparts, work out how to set up a mechanism for coordinating communication with affected populations more broadly.
Users will depend on the organisation involved and the roles and responsibilities of individual staff. It is expected they will be a mixture of programme managers, sector specialists, ‘beneficiary communication’ specialists, accountability officers and public health officers. The content of the message library will be owned and maintained by the individual Global Cluster leads in Health, WASH, Nutrition, Education, Protection and Food Security. It’s hoped that all actors involved in humanitarian response, including national governments, NGOs, international aid agencies, media development organisations, local media channels and the communities themselves can work in partnership wherever possible to identify the threats and then contextualise, adapt and disseminate potentially life-saving information to populations.
The messages are for crisis-affected populations. Each message has a target audience and depending on the “at risk” group, these can include some of the following groups: affected population, community leaders, parents and teachers. Many of the messages are targeted at mothers, fathers and other primary caregivers. This is because babies and children under 5 are often the most vulnerable in emergencies and so many of the messages are aimed at saving their lives. However, even though there are ‘at risk’ groups, most of the messages can be useful for everyone affected by the crisis.
http://infoasaid.org/sites/infoasaid.org/files/message_library_guide_sept_2012_0.pdf