BACKGROUND
Asia and the Pacific is the world’s most disaster prone region, being highly exposed to natural and man-made disasters. Between 2000 and 2014, over 40 per cent of natural disasters worldwide occurred in the region, including numerous ‘mega disasters’ such as the Indian Ocean Tsunami (2004), South Asian Earthquake (2005), Cyclone Nargis (2008), the Pakistan Floods (2010) and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (2013). In 2015 and 2016, the region also experienced large scale devastation with floods in Myanmar, the Nepal Earthquake, and cyclones in Vanuatu and Fiji. In addition to natural disasters, the region also accounts for a third of the world’s ongoing conflicts, the highest of any single region.
As elsewhere, in recent years Asia has seen disaster affected communities, civil society and the private sector playing a greater role in disaster response, a trend supported by increasing development in the region and a growth in access to information and communication technologies. Consequently it has become critical that preparedness efforts adopt a more systematic approach to engaging communities in planning for their own responses.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), with its regional partners, is working to ensure that emergency response plans use an integrated approach to addressing engagement with and accountability to communities. This includes recognizing that information and communications systems are a lifesaving form of aid in their own right that enable individuals and communities to make decisions that protect their lives and livelihoods, access assistance more effectively, express their needs and develop their capacities on their own terms.
CONCEPT
In Asia, there have been a number of pilot initiatives for improving coordinated community engagement in humanitarian action, be it in preparedness or response. During the response to Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu and the Nepal Earthquake response in 2015, a common service approach to community engagement was developed through technical working groups (in support of inter-cluster coordination) providing services for coordinated information provision and the collation and aggregation of community feedback to improve response-wide accountability. This collective model was replicated when OCHA’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (ROAP) deployed a Community Engagement Specialist to support the Humanitarian Country Team in Yemen.
Lessons learned from the Nepal earthquake response showed that communities often do not differentiate between humanitarian organizations (across an entire response) and that the humanitarian system has not always been accountable at the collective level to these communities. This has contributed to calls for improved response-wide accountability, resulting in humanitarian partners recognizing that a commonservice (or collective) approach to community engagement can be more effective than traditional agency or specific sector approaches.
Globally a diverse collection of partners are already involved in efforts to improve community engagement including the UN and international NGOs, and increasingly partners from civil society and the private sector, including local media networks, telecommunications and technology groups, and business associations. This is generating a much stronger localized preparedness and response environment, and is driving the international humanitarian response community to re-double its efforts to augment existing leadership and capacity to better engage with communities.
Collective approaches to engaging communities in humanitarian action are proving to make more efficient use of partners’ resources, improve coordination and build local capacities. It is therefore critical that all preparedness and response activities must adopt a more coordinated and systematic approach to engaging communities to ensure a genuine people-centered approach is integrated throughout all phases of the Humanitarian Programme Cycle (HPC).