Telling Stories That Matter: Visibility Support for IOM Somalia

Veynuus was engaged by IOM Somalia to document the human side of two very different programme areas: relocation activities for internally displaced people in Garowe, Puntland, and water, sanitation and hygiene interventions in Benaadir region. The brief was to produce one human story per location, supported by high-resolution photography and short documentary-style video, with consent handled properly at every stage. The material was intended for advocacy, learning and donor engagement rather than for a single publication.

Two regions, two programme types, and two entirely different stories. Relocation in Garowe is about movement, land and the question of whether a household has arrived somewhere it can stay. WASH work in Benaadir is about infrastructure that becomes invisible the moment it works properly, which makes it unusually hard to photograph. A single visual approach applied to both would have flattened the difference between them and produced material that felt generic to anyone who knew either programme.

The deeper difficulty is ethical rather than technical. Displacement documentation carries a long history of extractive practice: crews arrive, photograph hardship, and leave with images that serve the organisation better than the people in them. Getting this right means slowing down. It means explaining who the material is for and where it will appear, taking consent that is genuinely informed rather than a signature collected at speed, and being prepared to leave a strong frame out of the edit if the person in it would not recognise themselves in how it was used.

Field conditions compressed all of that into short windows. Access to displacement sites depends on clearances and on local relationships that have to be respected rather than assumed. Time on site is limited, often for security reasons, and the interviews that carry a human story are precisely the ones that cannot be rushed.

Veynuus treated the two locations as separate productions with a shared standard rather than as one assignment shot twice. In Garowe, documentation followed IDP relocation activities, and the story was built around what relocation actually changes for a household. In Benaadir, the team documented the real-life impact of WASH interventions, where the work is to make an outcome legible: what the water point replaced, who walks less far because of it, what a household does differently.

Consent came before cameras. Every contributor was told what the material was for, who would use it and where it might appear, and consent was recorded on that basis before filming or photography began. Coverage was fully consent-based across both locations. In practice that also meant accepting limitations: where someone agreed to speak but not to be identified, or agreed to photography but not to video, the production adapted rather than negotiating.

The interviews were structured to let people speak about their own circumstances rather than to confirm a programme narrative. That is a slower method and it produces better material, because the details that make a story usable, the specific thing that changed, the particular difficulty that remains, are rarely the ones a question list anticipates. Photography ran alongside the interviews so that stills and footage described the same reality rather than two edited versions of it.

Throughout, the team worked to the standard that the person in the frame should be able to see the finished piece and recognise themselves in it with dignity intact. Resilience and recovery were the organising themes, not because they soften the subject but because they are the accurate description of what people in both locations were doing.

Delivery comprised field documentation missions in both Garowe and Benaadir, one human story produced per location, high-resolution photography, and short documentary-style video from each site. Two documentary videos were delivered in total, one for each region, alongside the still image sets.

The work in the field was a mix of programme documentation and portraiture. The team photographed the interventions themselves so that IOM had accurate visual records of what had been built and delivered, then worked with individual contributors on the stories that gave those records meaning. Consent records were maintained as part of the deliverable set rather than as an internal formality, so that IOM could use any frame in the library with certainty about its provenance.

Editing kept the two locations distinct: each story was cut to stand alone, so that a WASH audience and a displacement audience could each be served without either piece carrying material it did not need.

The outputs supported IOM Somalia's visibility objectives by showing rather than describing the change on the ground. Two regions were documented, two human stories produced, and two documentary videos delivered, with consent-based coverage across all of it, in support of one UN agency's programme communications.

The material became working assets rather than a one-off campaign. The stories were used as tools for advocacy, learning and donor engagement, reflecting the outcomes of humanitarian investment through the eyes of the people it serves. A photo and video library with clean consent behind it can be drawn on repeatedly without the organisation having to re-examine each use, which is a large part of why documentation of this kind is worth commissioning properly.

Communications work in humanitarian settings is often judged on production values. The harder variable is method. Whether consent was properly taken, whether interviews were conducted in a way that let people describe their own lives, and whether the edit respects what was agreed, determines both the ethics of the material and how usable it is afterwards.

It also shows the value of documenting programme types that resist easy imagery. WASH outcomes are undramatic by design, and building a story around what has become ordinary requires a different discipline from photographing crisis.

• Field documentation
• Human stories production
• Photography & video
• Consent-based storytelling
• Advocacy content