Community engagement should be embedded in all efforts to make the humanitarian response more accountable, inclusive, and enabling to enhance community participation and overall quality of the humanitarian interventions. These include utilizing communication mechanisms, accountability frameworks and community participation channels to advance the people-driven response, safeguard the humanitarian principles and turn post disaster adversity into opportunities that will help better understand gender-sensitive vulnerabilities, enhance local resilience and adaptive capacity, encourage participation and emphasize equity of affected communities.
In practice, effective community engagement work includes establishing ways that ensure that affected communities regardless of sex, age or social status have access to the information they need to make informed choices, ensure that their voices are heard by responding agencies, and humanitarian agencies are accountable to respond to those issues or concerns.
Communication is a two way process and effective community engagement strategies deliver transparent dialogue between affected communities and humanitarian agencies (local and international). Community engagement work involves using all available communications channels including existing traditional or local forms of communication, print, radio, TV, SMS, human networks and social media as well as face to face (including but not limited to community consultation). It is essential to effective delivery of aid as well as pre-positioning of resources or capacities on preparedness.