The Community Context and Complaints Handling by NGOs - Global Accountability Discussion Series, #1

The Accountability Discussion Papers are a series of documents that describe World Vision’s current practice in accountability and encourage practitioners to take a step back and reflect on what works and why—with the objective being to elicit discussion and stimulate innovation relating to WV’s programmes.
This discussion presents “research in progress” undertaken by Global Accountability on complaints handling. It presents findings gathered from a combination of WV’s field programmes, through discussion with accountability staff and a review of published literature.

The overall theme of this study is to assess the type, the cost and the effectiveness of the complaints mechanisms being used by NGOs in their programme communities. As initial information was being collected, it became apparent that in order to assess cost and effectiveness many other factors also need to be taken into consideration. For example, two factors among many that influence the effectiveness of a complaints mechanism are its legitimacy and accessibility. Both these factors are themselves not easy to quantify or verify.