in aid responses.
• Strategies should be developed to ensure that women and marginalised groups
have full access to information.
• Women claim-holders should be represented in all decision-making bodies
6.2.4 Recommendation 3: Contribution to an enabling
environment and context
• Communities should be encouraged to develop their own contingency plans for
disasters and receive material support with the proviso that adequate
provision must be made for poorer and marginalised groups. This should
extend to a wide range of civil-society organisations including women's groups.
• National governments in disaster-prone countries should develop
comprehensive plans and procedures for disaster management, including the
management of information in order to ensure that communities are kept fully
informed at all stages of the response.
• They should also make plans not only for the establishment of a central body
to manage disaster responses but also to enable cooperation between
departments and between the centre and local government.
• Those responding to a disaster should ensure that full information about their
activities is available to all those affected, especially in local communities. This
might include public notices giving financial information, and public audits.
• Agencies should strengthen watchdog movements and support the mass media
to promote better understanding of the response and opportunities for
feedback and dialogue.
TEC Dec 2005 report
Their earlier report (Dec 2005) has been summarised on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami_Evaluation_Coalition#The_six_initial_findings :
The six initial findings
The TEC published an initial findings report in December 2005. These are preliminary findings based on initial reports from the more that fifty consultants involved in the field-work. It is expected that the final synthesis report will focus more on policy issues in the sector.
Relief was effective
The relief phase was effective in ensuring that the immediate survival needs were met, through a mixture of local assistance in the immediate aftermath and international assistance in the first weeks after the disaster. However, these relief responses were generally not based on joint needs assessments and were not well coordinated, leading to an excess of some interventions such as medical teams, alongside shortages in less accessible areas or less popular sectors such as water supply.
The scale of the generous public response was unprecedented, not only in the amount of money raised (about $14 billion internationally) but also in the proportion of funding from the general public, and the speed with which money was pledged or donated. The scale of the funding allowed an early shift to rehabilitation and the use of cash assistance programmes. It also acted as a giant lens, highlighting many of the existing problems in humanitarian response systems. The scale of funding also created coordination problems as it increased the number of agencies while removing some of the normal incentives for agencies to engage with coordination mechanisms.
Local capacity underestimated
Although local capacity is key to saving lives, this capacity is underestimated and undervalued by the international aid community as well as being overlooked by the international media. International agencies did not engage sufficiently with local actors, and assessed the skills of local actors relative to those of their own agency rather than in terms of skills appropriate to the local context.
Capacity of the humanitarian system is limited
The capacity of the international humanitarian system is not infinitely elastic. Despite the generous response to the tsunami, the appeals-based system for funding humanitarian emergencies is flawed, with a pattern of under-funding humanitarian response in general. This pattern of low funding for most emergencies limits the development of capacity within the international aid system, and makes it difficult for the system to scale-up to respond appropriately to a large emergency such as this.
Agencies focus too m