Inception Report - CDEMA

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a) Making CCDRR gender sensitive While acute gender-specific disadvantages for women (or men) are not prevalent in the region, gender issues still require some consideration. Oxfam 3 believes that women’s disadvantage – their unequal access to resources, legal protection, decision making and power, their reproductive burden, and their vulnerability to violence – consistently render them more vulnerable than men to the impacts of climate change and disasters. Women also bring certain advantages. For example, the skills and experience of women in building and maintaining local social networks can be critical for local disaster risk reduction. Understanding how gender relations shape women’s and men’s lives is therefore critical to effective climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and must be taken into account in all aspects of the design and delivery of the Programme. b) Approaches that take the underlying causes of vulnerability into account Many approaches to community-based disaster risk reduction fail to include a comprehensive assessment and subsequent consideration of the underlying causes of vulnerability. Without this information, it is likely that interventions will have little success in the long term. The IFRC, under its Preparedness for Climate Change (PfCC) initiative, is working with communities to conduct vulnerability and capacity assessments in vulnerable communities. This process identifies who is vulnerable and why. A crucial component of the project has been the recognition that livelihoods are a key aspect of building people’s resilience to various types of risk. Through its experience of working with communities, the IFRC has developed a wealth of tools and good practice methodologies aimed at helping to raise awareness, mitigate risks and develop community skills to respond to disasters. The CARIBSAVE Partnership has developed a methodology to assess the adaptive capacity and vulnerability of communities to climate change, and uses a livelihood approach to do this. Households within vulnerable communities are interviewed to determine their access to the five livelihood assets (financial, physical, natural, social and human). Livelihood strategies (combinations of assets) are evaluated to determine the adaptive capacity of households and consequently communities. c) Approaches that place a strong emphasis on preventative action (building resilience) Within the Caribbean region, the paradigm shift towards community resilience as part of a comprehensive disaster management approach predates the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 – 2015. In its 2001 Strategy and Results Framework for Comprehensive Disaster Management in the Caribbean, the Caribbean Disaster and Emergency Response Agency (CDERA), now <strong>CDEMA</strong>, acknowledged the community approach as an “effective way of selling integration of disaster mitigation to the population” because it can be applied on a scale and in terms that resonate at the local level. This shift to disaster risk reduction has also been a key feature in the IFRC’s work with communities in the Caribbean to reduce their vulnerability through raising awareness, consideration of existing community coping mechanisms, capacity building and participatory approaches to increasing their resilience. d) Strategies developed with communities Community involvement in the design of response strategies is critical and should be initiated from the outset. The IFRC, through its Regional Disaster Management Framework, and particularly the community disaster preparedness training to conduct vulnerability and capacity assessments, involves community members in the development of the tools which they will subsequently use to reduce the community’s vulnerability to disasters. The approach includes community identification of the perceived risks and capacities to generate a vulnerability maps and early warning systems. The Building Disaster Resilient Communities (BDRC) Project being implemented in 28 communities in Jamaica has engaged, and continues to engage, stakeholders in defining their own problems and solutions to inform 3 Oxfam GB, 2010. Gender, Disaster Risk Reduction, and Climate Change Adaptation: A Learning Companion Oxfam Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation Resources. 4
project design and implementation. For example, community training programmes are developed based on capacity needs that community members have identified. e) Establishing or working with existing local governance mechanisms in communities The success of community-based programmes depends, in part, on good governance systems. The BDRC project in Jamaica is working with and through local government and parish structures to target 28 communities. Jamaica’s local authorities and their Parish Disaster Coordinators are an important element of the project’s implementation arrangements, with key activities and some local level decision-making being done in association with and through them. Indeed, working with the guidance, buy-in and at the pace of personnel at this level has proven to be a critical factor in the smooth and uninterrupted roll-out in communities. The Red Cross National Societies are another important institutional mechanism for the roll out of DRR and CC programmes at community level. They have recently been placing greater emphasis on community level disaster preparedness, testing and applying different methods to support and implement local level interventions. As a consequence they add to the effectiveness of regional and national disaster management systems, whilst ensuring they are informed by, and are more responsive to, community needs and situations of vulnerability. The governance mechanism at the level of the community itself is also critical. In CANARI’s experience, it is almost always preferable to work with an existing community-based organisation than to try and establish a new one as the results tend to be evident earlier and prove more sustainable. However, whether the organisation is an established or a new one, there is likely to be a need for initial and ongoing identification and management of internal community conflicts (generally requiring an external, independent facilitator) and capacity building in aspects of organisational and project management. This has implications for the timeframe of any successful initiative and, in practice, there is often a mis-match between short donor project funding cycles and the desired long-term outcomes, resulting in disappointment and frustration for all parties. CANARI has found the use of mentors to be a particularly successful strategy in supporting the development of community-based organisations, particularly in the early stages when they may be developing proposals and implementing projects for the first time. It is also important to consider all the options available for structuring the organisation, rather than relying on the traditional, hierarchical structures with highly formal meetings that have been prevalent in the region and that tend to deter the participation of key stakeholders such as young people (and particularly young men) and those with low literacy levels or low self-esteem or confidence. If the initiative intends to have an entrepreneurial component, a for-profit or cooperative organisation may also be considered as an alternative or adjunct to a non-profit structure. f) Participatory monitoring and evaluation of community-based DRR and CC programmes Participatory monitoring and evaluation (PME) involves the local community, development agencies, local authorities and other stakeholders in measuring the progress made and the effectiveness of the processes employed, and in identifying the necessary follow-up actions to ensure that community vulnerability is consistently reduced. None of the current programmes in the region fully include this component. The Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (APDC) developed a Participant’s Workbook 4 on ‘Community-based Disaster Risk Management for Local Authorities’ which has a short module on ‘Monitoring and Evaluation’ (M&E), which provides an overview of what M&E is and some processes that can be used. M&E can be a costly exercise, contributing to the widespread failure to evaluate the long-term outcomes of programmes, projects, tools and methods (i.e. beyond the project timeframe) even though it is these long-term, sustained changes in knowledge, attitudes and behaviour that will be necessary for effective community 4 Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, 2006. Participant’s Workbook: Community-based Disaster Risk Management for Local Authorities. 5
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o proposal development and project
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Inception Report - CDEMA

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