Would you recommend this Ebola response to a friend?

By next Monday decision-makers in Sierra Leone’s National Ebola Response Centre and aid agencies fighting the virus will have Ground Truth’s first round of data on how the general public and front line workers perceive efforts to halt the spread of the disease. Gathering their views is an ambitious exercise but a bigger challenge is getting crisis responders to use it.

Using a mix of SMS surveys of the general public and phone calls to front line staff, the goal is to provide a regular flow of data from a representative sample of citizens as to whether, for example, they trust the health authorities enough to do what they are told, if women and girls have the same access to medical treatment as men, and whether burial teams respond to calls quickly. The survey also asks frontline workers if they feel safe and accepted by at-risk communities and, critically, whether they believe they are making progress in fighting the disease.

To minimise the burden, our methodology asks only a few questions around a set of key perception indicators that we track over time. In Sierra Leone we are collecting and analysing data from a representative sample of the general public each week and from front line workers every fortnight.

As my colleague Kai Hopkins said in his blog last week, getting the right kind of data is key. In Sierra Leone we are working closely with DFID, which has funded the Ground Truth programme there, and agencies like PLAN, Save the Children and Childfund International. Together, we have come up with questions that, in the parlance of the Sierra Leone and British military personnel who are leading the response, are ‘operational’. In other words, questions that yield answers that guide action.

More difficult than drafting good questions and providing robust data is encouraging responders to use the information. There are a range of explanations about why this is hard but they boil down to the need for the right incentives if we are to get busy people dealing with a huge threat to focus on a form of intelligence that, despite the supportive rhetoric from humanitarian high-ups, is not yet fully accepted as central to humanitarian action.

In Sierra Leone a lot will depend on the relevance of the data and the speed with which we analyse it (our goal is 24 hours). Ultimately, however, the utility of our contribution depends on whether the crisis managers take ownership of the evidence and use it to make course corrections when feedback indicates these are necessary.

By sharing the data with multiple organisations involved in the response as well as the broader public, we hope that transparency and mutual accountability will promote uptake and action. Getting this kind of buy-in and follow-through means rewarding managers and their teams for taking feedback into account rather than expecting them to know it all – or accepting they manage their programmes as if they do.

Donors have a major role in pushing this kind of accountability. Agencies do too as they build a cadre of humanitarians focused on measuring and managing their performance against the way people perceive the relevance and outcomes of their work.

In the grip of the Ebola crisis, Sierra Leone is a tough place to test this out. But the gravity of the crisis and DFID’s support in making the data available over the next critical months may provide the traction for a more responsive approach to managing humanitarian programmes. I will let you know how it goes.