Need longer time frames for rehabilitation - Annie George

"We need to look at a longer time frame of rehabilitation if we are serious about 'building back better', or 'mainstreaming with development', or even 'building long term resilience'. Longer time frame for support to ongoing interventions, mainly livelihoods, is emerging as a necessity rather than an indulgence." - Annie George, BEDROC, Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, India

The generosity evidenced post disaster is unfortunately not in sight after a couple of years- life goes on, NGOs move on and so do the donors. All the talk about mainstreaming disaster response/ rehabilitation with mainstream development remains just that, a rhetoric that keeps sounding new after every disaster. Building back better requires time, effort and financial resources. Granted they are related to development and the local governments need to fund it. But, given their priorities, these vulnerable areas which contribute little to the GDP would feature pretty low down on their list of things to do.

Food security is not just about production. Equally or more important are also other aspects like safe storage, value addition, transportation and marketing. These aspects come to the forefront only after the first couple of year’s post- disaster. Unfortunately, there are no supporters by then as they have all moved to the newer disasters.

We need to look at a longer time frame of rehabilitation if we are serious about 'building back better', or 'mainstreaming with development', or even 'building long term resilience'.  Longer time frame for support to ongoing interventions, mainly livelihoods, is emerging as a necessity rather than an indulgence.

While I do understand that this would also have risks of supporting non-starters, we can learn from the thirty year discourse on sustainable livelihoods, post-disaster, and limit interventions to those that are traditional, sustainable, replicable and scalable. But rather than letting this fear constrain any developmental, long term action, we should let this fear play a more constructive role of better oversight and due diligence in selecting long term interventions.