Faisal Jarmi worked with the Humanitarian Collaborative as a researcher in Lebanon, supporting qualitative interviews, participant discussions, transcription, and analysis.

Q: What was most meaningful to you about working on the evaluation and with refugee populations?
“For me, working with Amna was one of the most important and beneficial experiences on both a personal and professional level, especially in terms of using diverse assessment tools, participating in discussion sessions with a strong focus on details, and understanding how well the programs align with the needs of the beneficiaries and how important they are for them. Working with refugee populations and doing qualitative interviews allowed me to understand the personal experiences of migration and how different people deal with it. It allowed me to understand better the depth of the problems refugees face and their coping mechanisms.”

Q: What did you learn, or how did you grow, during the research process?
“It helped me develop the ability to understand monitoring and evaluation tools, manage discussions among participants, and better understand children’s emotions and trauma. I learned how to adapt my questions in semi-structured interviews. I also learned how to build trust with research participants. This research provided me with an opportunity to understand the different organizational structures of civil society and the relationship between different organization members and dynamics between teams. I improved my ability to write transcripts and explain the interview dynamics and added my own analysis without imposing my personal impressions on the interview or the findings.”

Q: What would you recommend to organizations considering working with researchers with lived experience?
“I think working with researchers be from the local community or individuals with relevant connections, as they have full awareness and a deeper understanding of the reality and conditions. Working with researchers from the same community in question, including refugees, can add a level of depth and sensitivity that is hard to achieve otherwise. I recommend that working with researchers with lived displacement experience must be done in a sensitive and fair way. That means the payment should be fair (and I believe Amna did that well), I also believe that researchers should be able to participate meaningfully in all the stages of the research process including the design and analysis (which was also done well by Amna). I think that providing researchers with training and publicly crediting them for their contribution is very important as it helps in their career development.”

Q: What are you working on now, or what would you most like to work on next?
“Currently, I am working with the new Syrian state as part of the reparation team in the transitional justice commission. However, the income from this job is very little and I am doing it while I search for other jobs. I am currently searching for consultancies in the research, monitoring and evaluation sector.”