Attachments
Speaking a minority language can increase vulnerability Translators without Borders produced this guidance to help humanitarian responders engage in more effective dialogue with communities in their own languages. We looked at ways people access complaints and feedback mechanisms, such as complaint boxes, hotlines, and face-to-face communication.
In northeast Nigeria literacy levels are low, many languages are spoken, and women generally have less access to technology than men. Structural inequalities also place women, older people, and less educated individuals at a disadvantage for receiving and sharing critical information. This disconnect can limit humanitarian services’ reach and impact and has broad implications for accountability.
Humanitarian organizations are used to looking at factors such as poverty, gender, age, and disability as drivers of vulnerability, often overlooking the compounding factor of language. As Figure ǻ suggests, language and vulnerability are interconnected: speakers of minority languages often experience multiple layers of disadvantage — access to education and health care, nutrition, human rights, representation, access to technology. That means that minority-language speakers can be some of the people that humanitarian organizations most need to reach — but they can also be some of the most difficult.