Typhoon Yolanda: Lessons in post-disaster management

It has been more than six months since the fiery typhoon Yolanda (the local name of Haiyan) struck. Most of the affected people in the Philippines are still recovering from the devastation. Responding to the Yolanda aftermath was quite different from the experience of facing any other such natural disaster that struck in recent past. It was a real test for both the government and the development partners as to how efficiently and effectively they could respond to the disaster mitigation need. However, this disaster offered a lot of lessons for the community people, for the government and also for the development partners and humanitarian workers.
Ideally, the recovery mission focus is on how to help the disaster-affected communities rebuild infrastructure, provide adequate long-term housing, offer community services, restore health and social services, promote economic development and restore natural and cultural resources. So, immediately after the rescue and relief operation, development partners are supposed to concentrate on working on this in a coordinated manner. But the observation shows there was really a lack of coordination among the development partners and even it was difficult for the local government of the Philippines to coordinate efforts of NGOs (non-government organisations) in a particular municipality. Though the UN-OCHA and the disaster cluster tried to make response more effectively coordinated, the time and intensity of the disaster did not allow them to do it up to the expectation. However, it shows how important it is, especially for a country like the Philippines, to have some sort of contingency and comprehensive disaster preparedness.
According to the OCHA, there is a significant gap between the actual demand and necessary funding for responding to the Yolanda, especially in the area of emergency shelter and early recovery. In this situation, if the received fund cannot be utilised effectively, what can be the net benefit for the affected people? Definitely it cannot be said that the aid in response to the Yolanda was not effective. But the questions, raised over the overall response of donors and development partners, cannot be ignored.
There are three significant lessons we can draw from the overall experience of responding to the Yolanda:
UNCOORDINATED RESPONSE: The severity of the disaster and the volume of losses did not allow the NGOs to have a coordinated response. As there was no pre-plan or contingency plan, the NGOs came on board and tried to respond as quickly as possible. But while doing this, they not only faced challenges but also inspired the communities to face some challenges. All the NGOs had short-term disaster response projects, so it was difficult for them to have some good groundwork or planning and also a good coordination with the government or with the other NGOs. Their main tension was how to deliver the work quickly.
Apart from the short durability of the projects, there were two other issues, for which a coordinated response was difficult, i.e. different organisations have different missions and different organisations have different official procedures, especially for procurement and financial transactions. For instance, when the Plan International and the Save the Children International are focusing more on the health issues concerning children and mothers, the Islamic Relief and the Christian Aid are concentrating more on the issues of shelter and rehabilitation. UNDP and Oxfam initially focused on cash for work so that people could have some money in hand to meet their daily expenses. So, for the organisations with different areas of focus, it was difficult to coordinate their efforts. Again, as the organisations have different procurement and financial transaction procedures, it is difficult for them to go for joint procurement. All these reasons made the collaboration quite impossible.
MONEY INJECTION AND LOCAL MARKET DISTORTION: There is a debate on how to respond to the immediate need of disaster-affected people: by providing food or by providing cash? If you give cash, it will create inflation and the food shortage will be severe and, if you give food, the overall productivity of farmers will be low and they will be less interested in further production. That is why, while responding to these types of massive disasters, a quick but proper contextual analysis is essential.
UNDP and mainly Oxfam came up with some Cash for Work (CFW) programmes as they wanted to inject some money into the economy so that the people could at least buy their daily food and thus the economy also moved ahead. But they set the wage rate significantly higher than the minimum at the local level. As a result, even those people who had work, left their regular work and started working under the CFW programme. It created a big labour shortage in the market. Some other NGO officials noted that even when they were searching for people for doing reconstruction work, they were not finding them, as all were involved with the CFW. This is how the interventions of the other NGOs were hampered. But this wage inflation also could not give anything good in the long term. The people, who used to live with only 2,000 PHP a month, were getting more than 6,000 PHP, but it was not converted to savings, rather all the money was spent for consumption. People were very happy with the existing benefit of aid but they failed to consider its durability.
SHORTAGE OF GOODS HAMPERED RECONSTRUCTION: Sudden boost in the demand for goods and services created a shortage in the market. When more than 50 per cent houses in the affected areas needed to be reconstructed completely, it put a high pressure on the demand side of construction materials. This is how both the goods supply and the labour supply became difficult. That is why, the NGOs could not implement their work as per the plan, when, on the other hand, they were in a rush to complete the project in time. This shortage also pushed the price of construction materials up, which was the cause of budget failure for some of the NGOs. Several of them wanted to buy some of the materials from the central Cebu, but it also takes a lot of time and a high transport cost.
The complexity of this large-scale disaster really undermined the disaster preparedness and also the disaster response initiatives. These unintended consequences created both challenges and learnings for the implementers. Now it is expected that these learnings will be incorporated while responding to any future emergency. Now it is time to link these reconstruction initiatives with long-term development agenda where the sustainability issues of those infrastructures should get the high priority.  
The writer is a post-graduate                 fellow at the Asian Institute of Management in Manila.                      [email protected]