Self-recovery housing for development: scaling up crisis preparedness and humanitarian shelter response

Description

Earthquakes, storms, floods, and conflict cause untold damage to infrastructure, services, agriculture and livelihoods. The destruction of housing is often most visible, and the most devastating to the families, with often hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Householders themselves are invariably the first to respond; they are never passive, and signs of shelter recovery are very apparent from the first days after a disaster. The majority - as many as 80 or 90% - receive little or no assistance from the international community and are the main drivers of their own recovery process. This process has been termed 'self-recovery'. Previous GCRF awards supported interdisciplinary teams led by ODI in collaboration with CARE International UK, BGS, UCL and Loughborough University. They developed the understanding of the self-recovery process and advanced the theoretical basis for humanitarian assistance to the process of supporting self-recovery in practice. In large part as a result of this work, self-recovery is now a strategic element of the humanitarian shelter sector discourse with many disaster responses purporting to support this inevitable process. In recognition of the value of a people-centred approach that moves away from the convention product-based modalities, the CARE Philippines post-cyclone self-recovery project won the 2018 World Habitat Award in acknowledgment of its self-recovery focus. Sixteen thousand houses were built, each one unique and reflecting the priorities and means of each family. https://www.world-habitat.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/post-haiyan-self-recovery-housing-programme/ The self-recovery approach that respects the primacy of agency and choice aligns well with current humanitarian and development concerns such as the 'humanitarian development nexus', the Grand Bargain's emphasis on localisation, participation and cash-based responses, the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Shelter Cluster strategy. This is further explained in the Business Case. However, very little has been done to develop guidance for practice. With the exception of the protocol 'Informing Choice for Better Shelter' that delivers a guide for the development of technical educational material, there are no published tools nor guidelines that provide an implementation framework for self-recovery in shelter projects. This project addresses this gap. CARE International has over 70 country offices across the world, all of them in ODA eligible  countries. All of the proposed activities will take place two hazard prone countries where there is a CARE presence and/or an activated coordination system in the form of a country level shelter cluster. The potential regions to be selected include South Pacific islands, East Africa, Central America, Philippines and SE Asia the precise locations to be dependent on ongoing and new disaster responses. In all instances the research team will be working with the Global Shelter Cluster, country level clusters and/or CARE International country teams. These will all be ODA eligible countries. The protocol developed will be adapted to become a preparedness tool for the specific ODA eligible country context. All outputs will be thoroughly scrutinised by the humanitarian sector and incorporated directly into practice.

Objectives

The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. The fund addresses the UN sustainable development goals. It aims to maximise the impact of research and innovation to improve lives and opportunity in the developing world.

Location