Documenting Durable Solutions — IOM Somalia, Grible Project (Saameynta Programme)

IOM engaged Veynuus to document its durable solutions work at Grible, outside Bossaso, under the Saameynta Joint Programme. The assignment produced a complete multi-format media package: a flagship documentary, six thematic short films, a vertical social media video, 240 photographs and a written blog post, all delivered within IOM's deadline.

For decades, displacement in Somalia was met with short-term responses: emergency shelters, distributions and temporary fixes. Saameynta, meaning impact in Somali and jointly implemented by IOM, UNDP and UN Habitat, takes a different approach, supporting the Federal Government towards durable solutions for 3.8 million internally displaced people. At Grible that shows up as permanent housing, legal identity, livelihoods and the beginnings of belonging in a place. Communicating that is harder than communicating an emergency, which has an obvious visual grammar; a durable solution is a slow accumulation of things working, and its most important elements are frequently the least photogenic.

IOM's requirement compounded the difficulty. The same body of material had to serve internal reporting, donor communications, social media visibility and public awareness, across several thematic areas and in several formats. Those audiences want genuinely different things: a donor report needs the programme logic visible, while a social platform needs a story that holds attention for under a minute on a vertical screen.

Underneath all of it was the standard the subject demanded. These are people's homes and lives, not illustrations of a programme. The stories had to be told with authenticity and care while meeting professional production quality, and the whole package had to be produced to a tight timeline.

The central decision was to plan the shoot around the whole package rather than any single output. Nine finished videos, a photographic record and a written piece cannot be produced by nine separate approaches to the same field visit. We built one shoot plan covering the flagship narrative and the six thematic areas together, so that each day's filming served the documentary and its corresponding short at the same time.

The flagship film is a five-minute horizontal documentary telling the story of Grible as an integrated narrative: the movement from displacement to permanent homes, legal identity, livelihoods and community belonging. A single continuous story mattered because the point of an integrated approach is that the components reinforce one another: a house without a land deed is precarious, a deed without a livelihood insufficient. The documentary had to carry that logic rather than list the parts.

The six two-minute thematic films then went deeper into distinct dimensions: Youth Engagement and Social Cohesion through Soccer for Peace; Protection and Health through access to the MCH facility; Durable Housing and Liveable Neighbourhoods, covering 61 newly constructed homes with land deeds; City Strategy and Partnerships; Livelihoods Activities; and Cash for Work Activities. Each is designed to stand alone, because IOM needs to use one in contexts where the other five are irrelevant, while all six stay consistent with the documentary in look, voice and treatment.

The one-minute vertical video was framed vertically in camera rather than cropped from horizontal footage afterwards, because social content assembled from offcuts looks like what it is. Photography ran alongside the filming throughout, with the stills photographer working to avoid disrupting interviews the video team was covering. Interviews were conducted to serve the written piece as well as the films, so that the blog post could be written from what people actually said.

Field production covered the full breadth of activity at Grible across the six thematic areas plus the connecting material the documentary required: filming in homes, at the health facility, on the pitch, at livelihoods and cash-for-work sites, and across the neighbourhood itself, while gathering the interviews that carry the narrative. Sequencing was built so that each location fed more than one output, which is what makes a package of this size deliverable inside a single production window.

Post-production ran as one process with nine outputs rather than nine separate edits. The documentary was cut first as the reference for tone and treatment, with the thematic films built to sit inside the same world and the vertical cut prepared to its own rules. The 240 photographs were prepared as a documentary record of the full breadth of activities, usable independently of the films. The blog post was drafted as editorial writing in its own right rather than a transcription of the voiceover. Everything was delivered inside IOM's deadline.

The engagement produced nine videos, 240 photographs and one written piece, covering six thematic areas, all delivered on time. IOM received a complete package rather than a set of assets requiring further work before use: a flagship film for formal and donor contexts, six thematic shorts for targeted use, a vertical cut for social platforms, a photographic record for reporting, and editorial content for its digital channels.

The content captured the human reality of a project that goes beyond shelters, building inclusive and sustainable urban spaces from the ground up, and gave IOM the assets needed to share that story with the world. For a programme whose central argument is that durable solutions are possible in Somalia, documenting that argument in a form donors, government and the public can each see for themselves is part of how it gets made.

Multi-layered communications assignments for international organisations in fragile and sensitive environments are as much a planning discipline as a creative one. The quality of the nine finished pieces was largely determined before filming started, by the decision to treat them as one production with shared source material instead of a queue of separate jobs. That is what made the volume achievable inside the deadline without the care owed to the people in the frame giving way under time pressure.

• 1 × 5-minute flagship documentary video
• 6 × 2-minute thematic short-form videos
• 1 × 1-minute vertical social media video
• 240 high-quality photographs
• 1 × written blog post