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Options and Solutions in Reconstruction Projects Dolly Jain dolly_jain@yahoo.com Following the devastating earthquake that killed thousands of people and destroyed hundreds and thousands of houses, Concern Worldwide1 initiated a relief operation followed by longer term rehabilitation activities in response to the main problems faced by village communities in Saurashtra. These included shelter needs, livelihood security, water, vulnerability to further disasters and organizational capacities of the local NGOs. The overall objective of the programme was to assist vulnerable villages and families affected by the January 26th 2001 earthquake to restore basic services and livelihoods through sustainable rehabilitation activities. The three specific objectives were:
With these underlying objectives, Concern partnered with local organizations and developed separate proposals with each. The partners working for shelter initiatives are ANANDI, Cohesion Foundation, Gramya Vikas Trust (GVT), Navsarjan, SWATI and UNNATI. This article discusses the primary observations of Development Alternatives' team, while doing an independent review of the programme for Concern Worldwide. Highlights of individual partner projects can be found in the accompanying boxes.
All initiatives under the programme targeted the most vulnerable families in the community. The selective targeting has favoured women, very poor families, disabled, widow headed families, families who have not received cash compensation from government, and dalits.
All the initiatives, including shelter and livelihoods have been implemented through a participatory approach. All stakeholders, including families, local mahila mandals, village committees, implementing local NGO, village panchayat etc had pre-defined roles to perform. In most projects beneficiary selection, decision making in design, procurement of materials, management of construction and quality control of material and masonry work was done by mahila mandals. The mandals have maintained accounts and records and have strictly followed project and process guidelines. The project partners have tried to ensure that the capacity of the community stakeholders is built up to enable them to act as real owners of the process.
All the projects were designed with the objective of empowering the community; especially the vulnerable groups like women, poor and discriminated communities. The initiatives encouraged capacity building at different levels to increase the coping ability of the communities to such future disasters. An example of such an activity is the masons’ training programmes. Not only have the masons been trained, the families have also been made aware of safe building techniques. Navsarjan’s view on the emphasis on dalits for housing is another example where a house has been seen as a way to provide social security and status to an otherwise discriminated community. The women centered approach and the focus on single women headed households has also been to provide an asset and security to these vulnerable groups. The projects have not stopped at that; women have been trained as in ANANDI and SWATI in masonry skills to provide them avenues for an alternative livelihood. The approach of consolidation of women’s collectives into self help groups for savings and livelihood creation by Cohesion Foundation, ADANDI, SWATI and GVT have similarly set up local institutional mechanisms to strengthen vulnerable groups in villages.
In all the projects, the objectives have been designed based on the regional conditions and local needs of families. Existing local systems, like village panchayat, local mahila mandals etc have been used to design and implement the project processes. In the space design and construction technology selection too, projects have opted for the locally available and acceptable options. Except for some houses in Unnati where the project has experimented with an alternative construction technology, namely the Compressed Earth Blocks, more or less all shelter activity has relied on the locally available materials. While this is positive on the one hand, it could be said that the opportunity to explore the utilization of “energy efficient and environment friendly” building technologies has not been utilized. It is however interesting to note that in the mason’s training centre, set up by SWATI, new technological options appropriate for the region will be explored and introduced to the surrounding villages in due course.
A fine balance of process and end products (targeted number of houses, roof rainwater harvesting systems and sanitation blocks) has been achieved in most of the projects. While, some implementing partners have focused more on the process aspects rather than the final numbers achieved, others have focused more on the end numbers of houses constructed without forgoing the minimum process required. Each project has independently defined the process aspects and has then set up mechanisms for ensuring that the projects are able to implement the required targeted through the defined process. Cohesion Foundation set up a “procurement by the families” process in order to economize on costs. The selection of beneficiaries in most cases has been a community process. ANANDI has set up an extremely rigorous but simple material and manpower recording system (as in simplified stock books and labour records) and family passbooks (to ensure transparency and accountability) in order to enable the mahila mandal samities to manage the construction process. Thus they could ensure the process of “management by the community”.
One of the objectives of Concern’s reconstruction program in Gujarat has been to strengthen local capacities of communities and its local implementing partners alike. Concern has been able to perform that role of providing support for organisational capacity building, although at different levels with different implementing partners. Support was provided as was required by the partner. All implementing partners, accept the contributions Concern has made in their development as an institution. Most implementing partners were small-scaled organizations that had not been exposed to projects of the magnitude close to a hundred thousand rupees. Concern provided them with hard and soft support alike, in developing project proposals according to acceptable standards, maintaining detailed financial reports etc.
This observation links directly with the flexibility of the Concern’s reconstruction program, whereby the implementing partners had freedom to develop their project proposals based on the needs of the community and linked to the individual agency’s approach to the situations. This also reflects positively on the partner selection process. Concern's decision to work with smaller agencies even while “supporting” not stifling the primary agenda, approach and process design of the partner agency has been appreciated by all partners.
Several elements of the Concern Worldwide approach and positive experiences of the project partners are worth replicating in similar contexts. Once the necessary pre-condition of according primacy to what people really need and designing a flexible, responsive mechanism has been fulfilled; such a programme is extremely effective in reaching the really needy and addressing their priority concerns. q Contact Concern Worldwide at Email: concern.guj@icener.net References 1. Concern Worldwide’s mission in India is to enable absolutely poor people to achieve major improvements in their lives, which are sustainable without ongoing support from Concern India. To this end, Concern will work with the poor through local and international partners who share their vision to create just and democratic societies where the poor can exercise their fundamental rights. |
Post-Earthquake
Rehabilitation and Recon-struction’ was undertaken by ANANDI in
association with People’s Science Institute, with support from
Concern World Wide India. The main aim of the project was to
help, form and assist women’s collectives with the aim of
building their self-confidence and capacities to enable their
central participation in community based rehabilitation and
reconstruction process.
was
to contribute to the re-establishment in the livelihoods of
people and mitigation of disasters in the earthquake affected
areas of Kutch,
Patan and Rajkot districts.
in
three phases. The overall aim of the first phase of the project
was to restore the livelihood of the earthquake affected
families of nine villages of Okhamandal block in Jamnagar
district. The larger aim of the project in phase-II was to
improve household water security and help repair, retrofit or
rebuild earthquake damaged houses of poor people. The third
phase aims to improve the primary level residential education
facility for the children of rural families by providing a new
school building and better water and sanitation facilities.
term,
reconstruction of the houses must be given priority to supply
the affected families with their most basic need, the Navsarjan
project was designed with the overall aim of rehabilitation of
the earthquake-affected families. It was a nine month intensive
initiative to support construction of 3000 one room units for
the needy Dalit and other poor families including 200 houses for
widow headed families. Beneficiary selection was based on
stringent criteria of vulnerability including a special clause
on demonstration of non-belief and non-acceptance of caste based
discrimination.
coping
capacities for future disasters – an intervention for community
based disaster preparedness, habitat and livelihood security”,
was aimed at improving the preparation of local community for
better recovery from natural disasters and to strengthen the
local capacity and community coping mechanisms by making local
community and statutory body better aware about disasters, and
building capacities of the vulnerable to gain housing and
livelihood security.
the
objective of bringing about socio-economic empower-ment of
women, in the Patdi, Dhrangadhra and Lakhtar blocks of
Surendranagar district, Gujarat. Following the 2001 Gujarat
earthquake, SWATI engaged itself in relief operation in its
project areas. The need for appropriate shelter against the
summer heat and the approaching monsoons was largely felt by the
people and was their immediate concern. The people also felt
that, since the government compensation would not be available
immediately for reconstruction, they would require a temporary
shelter. Hence the semi permanent houses. SWATI took up the task
of providing short term rehabilitation through the construction
of 2500 houses in 2001, out of which 724 semi permanent houses
were sponsored by Concern Worldwide.