Pick up almost any news feature or aid agency release on disaster, conflict or development, and the story will most likely begin with a snapshot description of a supposedly real person caught up in the crisis.

Backed up with a couple of pithy quotes, it can be a useful way of introducing a wider analysis of the social and political issues. It is, or so the theory often goes, a way of humanising the individuals involved, thus bringing the story alive and giving the readers an opportunity to relate to the issues on a more personal level.

But what do we mean when we say we're "humanising" the subjects of these stories. The more you think about it, the stranger an idea it becomes. Were they not human already? Is it within our power to humanise them?

Having worked as both a journalist and an aid worker, I know from experience how easy it is to get confused on this issue. The reporter needs a dramatic quote to back up his story to meet his deadline. The press officer needs the poignant story to grab media attention and mobilise donors. So we subtly manipulate the comments of those we interview to fit in with those goals.

We might tell ourselves we're giving a voice to the voiceless and dispossessed, but all too often we're actually hijacking their voice to convey messages that we've already decided upon. The one thing we're not really doing is listening.

An excellent new website launched by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) looks like it could put some of this right.

IDP Voices lets people who have been uprooted their own country's borders tell their life stories, in their own words, providing a platform for authentic oral testimony, unmediated by the requirements of news organisations or aid agencies.

Developed in collaboration with the Norwegian Refugee Council and the London-based Panos development media agency, the project has got under way in Colombia, collecting the life stories of just a few of the 3.8 million internally displaced people in the country.

Careful preparation goes into the collection of these stories. For the Colombia project, a cross-section of psychologists, community and social workers and displaced people themselves were selected from within the affected communities and given a training in open-ended biographical interviewing techniques.

This included ensuring that the interviewees understood what the interview was for, listening to them actively and avoiding leading questions. The interviewers were also briefed on ethics and confidentiality. All basic stuff, you might think, but it's surprising how often those elements fall by the wayside in the scramble to get a story.

Critically, the interviewees were then given time to say what they wanted to say, not pressured into saying what the interviewer needed them to say. It's a time-consuming process, but the results speak for themselves - literally.

There's Sofia, a 31-year-old teacher from the displaced Bari community in Colombia's Norte de Santander region. She speaks movingly of the terror of watching children lose touch with their tribal roots before getting press-ganged into armed militias. We read of the environmental degradation inflicted by oil companies that has destroyed the Bari's traditional herbal medicines, unleashing sickness and disease on her family and friends.

We hear from Carlos, a 26-year-old peasant farmer from the northeastern Choco region. He talks of the struggles of fleeing from the countryside to the city, where women tend to get cleaning and washing jobs. It can be more difficult for a man "who has lived all his life in the countryside (and) doesn't know how to mix cement with sand".

As IDMC acting head Jens-Hagen Eschenbaecher explains, the testimonies are aimed at adding an important new dimension to the way agencies plan projects to assist the internally displaced.

"We read many documents and listen to speeches about taking the views of IDPs into account when developing policies, but organisations have struggled to make that happen," he says.

"What is always missing is the individual voice. This has been the long-standing gap."

Eschenbaecher says that work has begun on another oral testimony project in Georgia and plans are in the pipeline to address thematic concerns such as the displaced in urban environments.

IDMC calculates that 24.5 million people worldwide are currently displaced within their own countries. Some 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes in 2007 alone.

While aid agencies and journalists obsess over funding, deadlines and technical priorities, the IDP Voices represents a small beginning in cataloguing the real-life experiences of this vast mobile population.

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