When your immediate needs are met, you can fight harder to make a living: perceptions of aid in Burkina Faso

Unstable governance and an intensification of armed violence, compounded by climate change and heightened food insecurity, continue to fuel humanitarian crises in Burkina Faso. At the time of this report’s publication, 4.6 million people need humanitarian assistance.

According to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), “How communities experience and perceive our work is the most relevant measure of [humanitarian] performance.” Ground Truth Solutions has monitored whether people feel their views influence humanitarian decision-making in Burkina Faso for the past three years. Although our results from 2022 indicate that perceptions of humanitarian aid have improved since 2021, assistance in Burkina Faso still falls short of people’s expectations. Communities want to be better informed and consulted on humanitarian programming in their areas. They also think that aid could be more relevant and more equitable. 

This report presents findings from an iterative process of data collection and dialogue. We spoke with internally displaced people (IDPs) and non-displaced people across the six main regions of the humanitarian response (Boucle du Mouhoun, Centre-Est, Centre-Nord, Est, Nord, and Sahel) to understand what they think about the aid they had received over the previous six months. We then presented and discussed the results in a community dialogue session and through one-on-one qualitative interviews in the commune of Pouytenga in September 2022. Humanitarian staff also gave feedback through an online survey in August–October 2022.