Together We Stand

[ 58 ] Extending humanitarian impact Seki Hirano, CRS Senior Technical Advisor Shelter & Settlements; and Amy Hilleboe, CRS Senior Technical Coordinator, Disaster Risk Reduction I t is a feeling that many of us have when we assist fami- lies after a crisis — yes, we might have made an impact, but what about those we were not able to assist? In 2015, 60 million people were forced from their homes 1 by natural or man-made crises, but only a fraction of them were beneficiaries of shelter assistance. With climate change esca- lating the magnitude and frequency of disasters — increasing shelter needs — it is still rare that 100 per cent of the people affected receive shelter reconstruction assistance. We know resources are finite, so humanitarian and develop- ment organizations use targeting methods to channel support to the most vulnerable. Still, we can transform how we deliver humanitarian assistance in a way that fosters resilience on a much greater scale than can be generated by any single project. We have identified critical insights to help us do this as a global humanitarian community. Over the past decade, CRS has supported 165,000 fami- lies to reconstruct their homes after disaster using practices that can better withstand cyclones, earthquakes, floods and other hazards. Over time, our field staff observed that some people who were not program beneficiaries were adopt- ing CRS construction practices, while others constructed their own structures that left them even more vulnerable. We wanted to understand what motivated community members to model best practices on their own so that we could extend our impact to those we didn’t reach directly in our programmes. To do so, CRS undertook a multi-country study 2 in the back- drop of post-emergency reconstruction efforts in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Philippines andMadagascar. Our study found five key determinants of behaviour that significantly influenced how disaster-affected households who were not beneficiaries of our reconstruction programmes rebuilt after disasters. Image: Jennifer Hardy/CRS In Bangladesh, Rahima Begum discusses her future ‘dream home’ with a CRS-supported community outreach worker T ogether W e S tand