1. Why is people centered recovery important?

This is a summary of the points that came out of the sub-group discussions with disaster survivors from the flood and storm group.

• It empowers people, it strengthens human spirit and human dignity. 
  It builds confidence pride and dignity it helps to reduce the helplessness communities initially feel after a disaster.  This process can help reduce stress, trauma and depression amongst community members as it keeps people active and working towards improving.
  
  
• It helps address the real needs in the affected communities
  – people understand best their problems, know best what they need and don’t need, and are the best ones to solve those problems.
  
  
• It ensures that assistance goes to those that really need it
  and helps facilitate some level of equity.  When people lead the relief and rehabilitation processes, it creates more transparency and helps reduce corruption. (“Not everyone who comes to support you after a disaster has good intentions!”)
  
  
• It enables a faster, cheaper, more equitable and more efficient recovery process,
  and is therefore more sustainable.  It increases accountability and responsibility.  Governments are always slow in responding to disasters, and other outside actors may take advantage of the process.
  
  
• It not only builds houses but it builds people and communities
  – the goal of people-driven disaster rehabilitation is not only to rebuild destroyed houses, but to empower communities and build people.
  
  
• It enables local people to be the owners of their own recovery process. 
  In many disaster affected regions where homes were reconstructed without involvement of the community, the people continue to live in the camps or in their ruined homes and not in the new houses because they feel like aliens in those new houses, which a contractor built.  
  
  
• It can help reduce social divisions in disaster affected communities. 
  By encouraging across-the spectrum involvement of community members, it can ensure that the most vulnerable and most disadvantaged groups in a community (such as women, children, the elderly, lower caste and minority groups) get involved, get their needs on the table and get equal attention and help.  In India, in the rebuilding after earthquakes in Maharashtra and Gujarat and the tsunami in Tamil Nadu, the caste system, became less rigid after the tsunami (in some areas).  But in some areas caste system still presents a problem as people of one caste may not like to be housed in the same community as the others.
• 1993 earthquake in India, people became homeless.  So the recovery process started with grants being given for the construction of new houses.  But it appeared that men used up the money for gambling instead.  The local government changed the policy for house entitlement by involving the women/ women groups and that helped set right the problem.
• This also helped changed the traditional equation between the men and the women, with the women playing a more active and central role in decision making
• Earlier experiences in house construction/ reconstruction was that the new house was in the name of the man, this too has now changed and the reconstructed homes are now jointly in the names of the woman and the man.
• It helps disaster survivors to cope with trauma and depression
  by keeping them active, busy, working together and making them the prime movers in the process of managing, planning and carrying out their own relief and rehabilitation.  When you work as a group your individual problem does not seem so big.
  
  
• It builds people’s collective “community power” in many different ways. 
• It promotes a sense of belonging to the group, solidarity, security.
• By involving them in all aspects of the relief and rebuilding process, it strengthens people’s confidence in their capacity to manage their own longer-term development.  It helps people to become more articulate, more aware, more savvy about negotiating for what they need.  It empowers them.
• It strengthens communities’ collective management skills  because the community is the key management mechanism in the relief process – so all the rehabilitation direction and work comes from people and reflects their real problems and needs.   
• It strengthens women’s involvement and status as full, needed, active leaders in the recovery process, even in cases where their roles were more marginal or cloistered before the disaster hit.  In India, for example, women’s involvement was mostly confined to the house and were not involved in village decision making, but after the tsunami and earthquakes, were more involved, their opinions were sought.  In Thailand, women are equal partners to men, helping after landslides, floods and tsunami to help in doing damage survey, cleaning up, cooking food.
• It strengthens social relations and collective action.  Disasters can be a chance to rebuild society and restructure inequitable social relations within communities, and within larger constituencies.
• It increases people’s economic strength by making room for them to identify their economic needs and develop livelihood options to getting their lost jobs and businesses back to start earning and being self reliant again..
• It preserves affected communities’ customs, culture and ways of life: 
  Poor communities have a culture of living, and people have “knowledge capital” in how to survive, they have common beliefs, history and unity.  Without these things, they could not have survived!  Post-disaster development activities should not be used as a means of transforming communities into a new way of life.  People can maintain the spirit, local wisdom and culture of their affected communities throughout the rehabilitation process in ways outsiders can’t.
  
  
• It opens up deep, structural problems of poverty which have been simmering under the surface and have haunted and exploited poor communities for years and years, but which have not been addressed
  – problems like unclear land tenure.  These are problems which the government has not been able to solve through its conventional, slow bureaucratic  systems, but which the disaster makes urgent and open.
  
  
• Because geography demands it. 
  The impacts of disasters are widespread and so it is critical that the all those affected be involved from the very beginning (the Philippines, for example, is a country of 7,000 islands and experiences an average of 19 typhoons per year.  Dealing with so many natural disasters requires local people’s involvement - governments alone cannot handle them.

 

Who attended the meeting? 
There were about 200 people in this large gathering, most of whom were community members from areas that had experienced serious disasters in the past few years, including tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, storms, land-slides and droughts.

The seminar was organized and co-sponsored by

CODI

Chumchon Thai Foundation

ACHR

UN-Habitat and UNDP

 

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2. What are the tools, mechanisms and processes which enable affected people and their communities to drive their own recovery process?

3. How can we build linkages, networks and communication channels between affected communities?