In 2010 and 2011 Pakistan was hit by floods, which left one-fifth of Pakistan’s total land area under water. According to government data the floods directly affected about 20 million people – mostly destruction of property, livelihoods and infrastructure.

Three years later many people remained severely affected. This was when Ground Truth began to work with its partners Mercy Corps and the National Rural Support Programme in the Sindh Province of Pakistan. The goal was to gauge the perceptions of local people and integrate their thinking into the way the program was implemented. The focus was on a representative group of 15 villages with a total population of some 2,000 people – equally split between Muslims and Hindus.

Ground Truth brought the perceptions of affected people into the management of a large recovery programme funded by the European Union. There were 6 rounds of feedback collection in total. Data gathering was carried out by a team of enumerators recruited through Foundation for the Strengthening of Local Partners (FSLP), an organisation based in Karachi whose mission is to build the capacity of civil society in Sindh.