PARTICIPATORY NEEDS ASSESSMENT
In line with REPAIR’s commitment to listen to families experiencing family reunification, to better understand the challenges and barriers they face, and to identify concrete actions that could help address these, partners undertook a participatory needs assessment.
Prepared together with people form diaspora communities, and conducted through interviews, focus group discussions, and questionnaires, the assessment sought to understand the needs of families before, during and after the reunification process, and to identify perceived gaps in existing services.
Partners adopted a range of data collection approaches including focus group discussions, interviews with stakeholders, and surveys. An initial questionnaire for the needs assessment was developed by the Austrian Red Cross together with a diaspora organization based there. This was then reviewed by REPAIR partners and other diaspora organizations, and adapted accordingly.
A second survey was also developed to gather the views of organisations working with people in need of international protection, including UNHCR, ICRC country delegations, and others. To help ensure consistent data collection, both questionnaires were made available on the KoBo Toolbox platform: KoboToolbox.
The sample for the needs assessment was defined by project partners proportionally based on their number of family reunification cases, and the nationalities represented. The assessment spoke both to those already in a safe country and those seeking to travel to be reunited.
In all, 199 people with lived experience of family reunification participated in the assessment, with families from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iran, Eritrea and Rwanda being most represented.
Key findings include:
- The duration of the family reunification procedure was the issue mentioned most often by participants with more than half of families across all four partner countries separated for more than two years. As well as the ongoing pain of separation, knock on effects of this included high financial costs, safety concerns, and the psycho-social impacts of ongoing separation and uncertainty.
- Financial Concerns were prevalent at all stages of the family reunion process, with living and travel costs, and the cost of compiling all the documentation required for the reunification application and to subsequently travel, weighing particularly heavily.
- Lack of access to information was similarly reported as an issue across all stages of the process, and particularly felt during families’ first steps after arrival - particularly around access to accommodation and how to enrol children in school - with only 12 of 130 respondents confident they knew what to do.