Three-quarters of the poorest people in the world live in the rural areas of developing countries. Most of them depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Climate change, a growing global population, and volatile food and energy prices have the potential to push millions of more vulnerable people into extreme poverty and hunger by 2030.
The United Nations (UN) International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) invests in rural people, empowering them to increase their food security, improve the nutrition of their families and increase their incomes. The organization helps communities build resilience, expand their businesses and take charge of their own development.
UN IFAD
Connecting and Collaborating with Field Workers to Build Sustainable Solutions
Robyn & her team gave us the tools we needed to engage with our field workers and begin to change the way we provide prompt resourcing in a sustainable way.
UN IFAD Chief, Field Support Unit
Case Study
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UN IFAD workers dedicate their lives to helping rural communities across the globe. During the Pandemic, their needs and access to resources to aid in the performance of their daily jobs and support the communities they serve declined significantly. The IFAD employees asked the UN to intervene and make a change in order to help improve their conditions and pinpoint where the lack of resourcing and pain was present.
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Our team set out to conduct a series of rural worker interviews across all five of the UN’s regions (Asia and the Pacific, East and Southern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Near East North Africa and Europe, and West and Central Africa).
The key to gaining successful field worker qualitative and quantitative impactful data that would help to improve working conditions and provide leaders with an actionable plan was to first create strong, effective, and transparent visual communications through the use of design that was able to cross language barriers and cultures. We were also able to set up a process for collecting this valuable feedback in a timely manner, improving onboarding, and targeting opportunities where leadership and field workers could own the process and routinely run it without it feeling like another step in their daily routine.
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Two years in, and the organization is owning and operating their field worker feedback process through the use of a survey tool that works best for their people and can load in areas of low bandwidth. The field worker feedback has directly impacted the way the UN IFAD onboards new employees, provides resources based on location and need (i.e., HVAC units for warmer regions effected drastically by climate change), and embeds field workers more thoughtfully into the communities they are directly serving.
The targeted areas the survey and feedback process has been able to highlight make it easier for improvement and long-term sustainability. It has also allowed leadership to act quickly and effectively in securing funds and supporting their field workers in a way that was not possible two years prior to the effort.