RESPONSE 2006: LIVELIHOOD RESTORATION FOR RELIEF

Concern Worldwide is an Irish non-governmental, humanitarian organisation dedicated to the reduction of suffering and working towards the ultimate elimination of extreme poverty in the world's poorest countries. Concern's mission is to help people living in extreme poverty achieve major improvements in their lives. Concern works with the poor themselves, and with local and international partners who share the organisation's vision, to create just and peaceful societies where the poor can exercise their fundamental rights. Concern works in 28 countries throughout the world. Within these countries, Concern's work focuses on five core areas: education; emergencies, health, HIV and AIDS and livelihoods. Concern works as both a fast response emergency agency and a facilitator of longterm development projects. Concern recognises that there is a strong link between poverty and the impact of emergencies and maintains a clear mission to respond to emergencies alongside its established development work. Concern is dedicated to responding urgently, providing relief with dignity.

Context
In responding to emergencies Concern seeks to ensure that the victims of disasters are assisted in a manner that reflects the principles inherent in the Code of Conduct of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief. Emergency response and disaster preparedness have been high-priority areas for Concern Worldwide-India, owing to the vulnerability of the country to natural disasters. As part of its systematic response to disaster management, Concern Worldwide-India has developed and maintained the Concern India Emergency Register (CIER), which includes Concern India staff and experienced staff from partner organisations. CIER members have assisted Concern in providing support to its emergency response since 2002. Emergency response to flood victim of Orissa in 2006, is one more mile stone of Concern on its march towards providing relief with dignity.

ORISSA FLOODS, 2006

The Orissa floods of 2006 were yet another reminder to all concerned about the vulnerability of Orissa to disasters. Heavy rains from the middle of August 2006 resulted in large areas of Orissa being flooded, and damage to houses, loss of

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livestock, destruction of standing crops and farm lands, roads and communication infrastructure, etc. According to the government estimates, there were 3 million people affected by these floods in 7,000 villages. The programme was designed, bearing in mind the community needs, the local conditions and the responses of other agencies working in the area.

Assessment :
Concern, with its local partners, implemented relief programme in close collaboration with the state unit of Indian Red Cross and the district administration in Sambalpur and Kendrapara. Both these organisations carried out assessments in the flood affected areas. These organisations used Concern's rapid assessment form to ascertain the severity of the situation and identify those areas most in need of assistance. Concern's response to the floods was based on the findings of the assessment in the first few days after the floods. These assessments also included the information from various sources. In addition, immediately after the flooding started, Concern carried out an assessment. The information from this assessment was shared with other organisations as well as the government. Some of the findings of this assessment is given below:
Number of Districts affected Number of Blocks affected Number of Gram Panchayats affected Number of Villages affected Municipalities/Notified Area Councils affected Number of Wards affected Population affected Total number of houses damaged Crop area affected 23 128 1,484 6,846 24 184 3,000,000 144,716 477,570 hectares

The response strategy was designed to meet the priority needs of severely affected people as quickly as possible. The government response was relatively good focussing on providing food, medicines, drinking water, etc.. The shelter need was not prioritised to a large extent. With the flood waters taking a relatively long time to recede and shelter needs not adequately addressed, the duration of the emergency was extended. Therefore, shelter material (tarpaulin) supply was considered crucial to help people get through the period of being displaced or marooned, until they were able to resume their normal lives. The second most important challenge was to provide employment opportunities for the flood victims, thereby enabling them to earn their food with dignity. Thus Food and Shelter were the focus of emergency response.

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Targeting
Concern India's strategy with the first distributions after an emergency is to target entire villages that have been severely affected. This is done to expedite the relief delivery. Hence, for the general distribution, the following criteria were applied: villages that were submerged all or some villagers displaced villages cut off from the outside world considerable damage to houses, property and crops high proportion of vulnerable groups amongst population While selecting the areas, first the most severely affected blocks were prioritised. After this, the most severely affected Gram Panchayats within those blocks and then villages within those GPs were selected. Efforts were made to avoid duplication with other agencies through co-ordination at each administrative level.

Temporary Shelter
Transportation As there was no access roads to many of the affected villages, relief materials were moved to centrally located points in the midst of clusters of villages where access was possible and suitable storage facilities were available. The partners, in consultation with the village committees as well as the government bodies, selected these distribution sites. District and block authorities were informed about the storage and distribution locations. Distributions were delayed for in a few cases as the rains continued further. Distribution In order to ensure that relief items reached the most vulnerable flood Bimala's nightmare is the thought of another spell of heavy rains, which she is praying God not to show in the near future. She is one of the worst affected

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affected communities / families, the partners carried out surveys at the village-level and organised community meetings to identify the most vulnerable families. This list was verified at the GPand block-levels to ensure adherence to the selection criteria. Once the beneficiary list was finalised, tokens were issued to the selected families for identification during distribution. Village leaders, Indian Red Cross Volunteers, PRI members and SHGs were involved in the process along with the partners. Monitoring

The partners and Concern staffs carried out monitoring of activities on a regular basis. Concern staff carried out spot checks at the distribution sites in order to ensure that the correct families were being targeted and received the proposed items of the right quantity and quality. Distribution reports were submitted by the partners to Concern on a daily basis upon completion of the distribution for the day. Concern and the partners also met regularly to review the progress, share and discuss issues and plan for the next day. The second critical support that Concern provided to the flood victims was the opportunity to work. This project targeted people whose livelihoods had been severely affected by the series of floods that crippled a number of districts of Orissa during July, August and September 2006.

in her locality as she has a mud house to live in with her 7 members' family. Her house had two small rooms but the major part is collapsed due to the flash floods in Sambalpur.Her household materials got damaged & she had to take shelter in a school building where her family was provided with cooked food for three days. She was worried as to how her house could be repaired & her family could get a safe shelter as before. A polythene sheet may be a very small support to the suffering of Bimala's family, but for her staying together under the sheet is more consoling than being dispersed elsewhere. I will use the polythene sheet for roofing, at least now I can leave my children in my courtyard when I go for livelihood says Bimala when she receives the polythene sheet from the volunteers in the distribution point.

LIVELIHOOD RESTORATION : DIGNITY IN EMERGENCY

Under the cash-for-work (CFW) activity, each of the selected families was to be provided with 20 days of wage employment to it to meet the cash requirements of the household. The activities taken up under CFW included, cleaning of village ponds, repair of village approach roads, strengthening of field bunds, digging of new ponds, repair of damaged houses and crop land reclamation.

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Along with the cash for work, additional farm inputs were provisioned after the initial assessment with the target beneficiaries. These input were vegetable seeds for nutrition supplement and income, pulses for cash income and consumption, paddy seeds for cultivation, etc. These inputs support the target families to restore their livelihood.

Story of Sushama: Those without assets become the greatest losers

HOW MUCH WE TRAVELLED WITH SPHERE:

While addressing the emergency response, Concern tried to comply with some of the core process standards defined in the SPHERE guidelines as minimum standards. These are mentioned Sushama cannot read and write. She who supports her family comprising her ailing below husband and children. She is the lone breadA d h e r e n c e t o M i n i m u m earner, earns income as an agricultural Standards: labourer. She just lost any avenue for income as the farmers lost their crops twice in the spate Initial Assessment: Initial assessment format of of the floods of 2006. Concern was appreciated and used by government agencies and India Red Cross. In concertedly assessing the floods with the Indian Red Cross and disseminating the results among other agencies, including the government. This ensured that the relief process adopted adhered to the minimum standards from the outset. I was worried and desperate to feed my family. How can I think about my husband's treatment when my little children are starving? she asks. The floods only added to her woes.

The cash-for-work intervention from Concern was a timely help. It came after days of hunger and unemployment and hope. It gave her the much needed financial support. More importantly, it gave her a dignified way to Participation: support herself and her family it gave her work Implementing partners ensured which earned her money. that at every stage of program implementation, community

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members, elected representatives and village level institutions like VDC and SHGs were involved. Partners conducted village meeting to elicit the view of the community members on the local need and the appropriateness of intervention. As the entire village was being targeted for relief distribution, the representation of all groups in the community was also ensured. Community-level work like repair of approach roads, digging of ponds, etc. were decided by the target community members. This led

Asked by the aid worker about what she lost in the recent floods, she replies I am a poor landless woman. I have a thatched house which is partially damaged. I cannot say I have lost huge property. I am affected as I did not get wage after the flood which caused heavy damage to the agriculture in the area. But when I could not feed my children properly as there was no work, I had lost all my hope to earn bread for my family, I had lost confidence for survival, had lost faith on humanity. But the cash for work of Concern was a great solace to her. As she waits for her wage payment, she says, Now my children wait for me because they know I get money every 5th day of my work here and I buy something for them. My husband is also happy.

to a strong impact at the end of the project, where community members owned the work as their own creation. Women members were encouraged to participate in cash-for-work activities. This contributed significantly in promoting a sense of pride among the women members, as they received wages equal to their male counterparts'. Muster rolls, to record the work-days, were maintained by the villagers themselves. This worked as an effective tool to bring about transparency in operation. Targeting: Concern has adopted targeting criteria to identify the most vulnerable communities in the flood prone district and block. This was done systematically to reach out to the un-served and avoid duplication in intervention. Evaluation: Concern conducted a joint evaluation by IAG ( Inter-Agency Group) to promote crosslearning from its own operations among relief agencies. This IAG is a coordinating forum of all the international and national development agencies working on emergency response in Orissa. This process of inviting other agencies into the evaluation of Concern-supported project exhibited a high degree of impartiality in data collection, which is a key aspect in SPHERE' s common standard for evaluation. Further, the approach of identifying the potential of the victims to rebuild their community with their own effort, and at the same time earn their food with dignity confirms to the fundamental principle of right to life with dignity, as defined in the Humanitarian Charter in SPHERE.

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