Involving local youth in measuring Bolivian community flood resilience

Practical Action’s flood resilience work in Bolivia is grounded in the use of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance’s Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC). The FRMC is a framework and tool that helps communities understand their existing level of flood resilience and identify appropriate action for enhancing it.

The FRMC approach utilizes data collected via a mobile application through house-hold surveys, focus groups, and interviews with key informants. To do this data collection in the 13 Bolivian communities where they work, Practical Action recruited a team of 16 Field Workers.

Most of these Field Workers were young people, including recent graduates, local to the areas where we work. It was vital that they speak Aymara and understand the local context. Field Workers also need to be confident with technology, particularly mobile phone applications and management of digital information.

A user-friendly application for data collection

In a society where the work, experience, and perspective of young people is often overlooked we choose to prioritize the recruitment of young people to support our work. One of the benefits we expected from working with younger people was that their familiarity with technology.

The young Field Workers’ experience with mobile applications made it easy to train them in using the FRMC software. Feedback from Field Workers suggested that the FRMC application is user friendly and easy to apply for people familiar with mobile technology, and probably for those who aren’t too.

Translating flood resilience language to the local context

The field work team was trained both in how to use the mobile application and on the central concepts of resilience measuring. The biggest challenge they all faced was in how to adapt the questions in a way that was relevant and accessible to the respondents, without losing the question objectives.

Questions in the FRMC need to be translated not only to the local language but also the local context. Having people who know the geographical area, the cultural context, or who speak Aymara made this possible, especially when working with rural Andean women, who feel more confident speaking in their native language.

In addition, some of these young people had a history with the communities in question which legitimized their involvement and made the communication even easier. This was the experience of Rut, an indigenous woman whose father was a traditional wisdom authority in the territory. Rut herself has a leadership role as a member of a recognized youth platform:

Building skills for future career prospects

The young people who carried out the FRMC data collection learned a lot about the communities they worked with, about flood resilience in general, and have gained practical skills and experience which will help them as they progress in their careers.

Our experience, and the feedback these young people have shared with us, shows that we made the right decision to invest in young people when recruiting for our Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities data collection.

We encourage other organizations applying the FRMC to do the same, not only to build the skills of local youth but because of what they can offer in terms of experience, engagement, and expertise.