Saturday, August 14, 2010

Strategic Documents and Lessons Learned from West Sumatra Recovery

It’s always a big question after humanitarian efforts in disaster affected area, how to keep all lessons learned, and strategic documents and all sort of that so everyone can easily access it? Bigger disaster and bigger intervention make the question even more valid. In West Sumatra recovery, for instance, there are more than 70 international and national agencies works on recovery following the September 2009 earthquake disaster. Every agency has their experiences, approaches and expertise. It is rich variation on the way each agency undertake the recovery works. But I found out an important component to speed up recovery process those are come from sharing resource and joint effort amongst recovery stakeholders. Other important component to enhance the recovery quality and in the same time reduce the unnecessary cost is the replication on the best practices.

To answer the question above, West Sumatra Recovery Network website http://www.rn-unrc.org collects lessons learned from agencies that carried out recovery effort in west Sumatra. In this website we can find strategic documents produced by working groups such as shelter, disaster risk reduction and other working groups. We can download meeting, workshop and training materials as well so this website is like a living library which its document always regularly updated.

Arwin Soelaksono - Disaster Response and reConstruction

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Eco-Friendly Reconstruction

This paper was presented on Training for Facilitators, West Sumatera Post-Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, 12-15 May 2010
Abstract:

As part of rebuilding effort following September 30th, 2009, earthquake in West Sumatra, the Government, Society and various Non-Governmental Organization (NGOs), both local and international, launched interventions to help victims of disasters. One form of support is housing reconstruction. Reconstruction and rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of homes would need a lot of resources including building materials derived from nature. Learning from the cases of Aceh reconstruction, all parties should be wary of the potential environmental damage. Therefore all parties involved in the process of West Sumatra rehabilitation and reconstruction needs to think strategically to balance development efforts with ensuring environmental sustainability. The entire strategic plan must be able to be executed by the whole community and all actors of rehabilitation and reconstruction to protect the environment.

To download all paper content just click here

Arwin Soelaksono - Disaster Response and reConstruction