Tsunami Relief, Rehabilitation and Development - Activities 2004 — 2005 (Stromme Foundation)
Rapport | Dato: 23.12.2005 | Utenriksdepartementet
Tsunami Relief, Rehabilitation and Development - Activities 2004 – 2005 (Stromme Foundation)
Summary
SF's focus on immediate relief, followed by
rehabilitation assistance was to enable the affected communities to
recover from losses to normal life situation by restoring and
strengthening livelihood activities through appropriate
mechanism.
More than 30,000 tsunami affected families in 11 districts were assisted with emergency relief assistance costing NOK 2,713,075. SF also supplied 3000 ready made tents to the affected people through the government while more than 200 transitional shelters and 166 toilets were constructed to the value of NOK 2,042,687. SF’s mandate and focus are on livelihood support, more than any other intervention. Therefore, 7601 families were provided with livelihood support totalling a sum of NOK 4,616,245. This indirectly benefits more than 14,000 families. More than 500 pre-school children were given the opportunity to start schooling by replacing infrastructure and educational support worth NOK 54,806.
Co-ordination
The unprecedented global response to the disaster
generated a huge volume of funding for international NGOs from
private, bilateral and multilateral sources. Pressures to rapidly
implement relief efforts and spend donor funds on schedule have
been intense. SF's planning has been hampered by ineffective
coordination among these numerous competing organizations and the
government's inability to establish effective coordination policies
and structures. Within this context, SF worked through local
partner NGOs, identifying the needs and the gaps that are
prevailing in the areas, and coordinating nationally with CNO, FAO,
Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Social Welfare and the
Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA) in order to meet the
standards of the activities we carried out.
Sensitivity to Conflict Situation
SF’s interventions were mainly in the East. We are
working with all three major communities ensuring a balance and
applying Do No Harm principles in the interventions. In addition we
moved to the North as well through our new partner Wholistic Health
Centre (WHC) in promoting Psycho Social activities. A sum of NOK
166.511 was provided to train over 60 Psycho-social counsellors.
The programme has gained momentum meeting the needs and has reached
around 2000 persons including 220 children who are affected by war
and tsunami.
Decentralisation and Strengthening of Local Partners
Local NGOs have been strengthened with local
expertise to support and reinforce their capacity in managing
projects. Moreover, 6 local and expatriate volunteers were brought
to help the local partners to address capacity building of SF
partners through Fredskorpset. A National Workshop was organized
with GTZ, PLAN International and SF to create a forum to have a
policy on Post Tsunami Microfinance to maintain its commitment
towards sustainability and promote best practices of the
industry.
Participation of Tsunami Victims
In most cases the affected communities have become
passive recipients. However within our projects, our partners
liaised with the victims as well as the authorities in designing
work plans accordingly, in order to get the maximum participation
of the recipients and the stakeholders.
Use of Local Resources
In accordance with our policy, since all our
Partners are from the areas we work, they managed to a great extent
to use local manpower resources as well as local material and
technical resources from the same areas, with the exception of
importing tents for immediate requirements of temporary shelter at
the initial stage of the tsunami.
Corruption
SF's post-tsunami relief and rehabilitation and
development programme is being carried out in a complex social and
political environment. The government is exploiting the opportunity
to implement controversial policies such as establishing a coastal
zone, relocation of population into planned townships and national
control over the revival of the fishing industry. Three SF
partners’ services were terminated due to lack of capacity and good
governance.