This case study traces the collaboration of seven international humanitarian NGOs in Asia as part of the DEPP's Transforming Surge Capacity project. It identifies the enabling factors that have allowed the involved organisations to collaborate and produce an innovative inter-agency roster for Asia. It also captures what partners have learned from collaborating at a regional level.
The Disasters and Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP) is a three-year, £40m programme jointly implemented by the Start and CDAC Networks that aims to significantly improve the quality and speed of humanitarian response in countries at risk of natural disasters or conflict related emergencies. This programme is very much aligned with sector-wide discussions around the need to shift the focus of aid investment towards crises prevention, preparedness and building national humanitarian capacity in order to reduce the damage caused by disasters. In the past year, the DEPP has transitioned from its initial set-up phase to active implementation, and projects are now beginning to collect evidence around the many successes, challenges and results of their activities. This year’s DEPP Learning Report, produced by the DEPP Learning Project at Action Against Hunger, explores the extent to which the programme is leading to the changes it has set out to make. It does this by highlighting examples of key learning, reflections, successes and challenges from the 14 projects that make up the DEPP. This piece is aimed at both DEPP stakeholders as well as other humanitarian actors with a vested interest in emergency preparedness and response.
The Asia regional roster was set up as part of the Transforming surge capacity project. The aim was to facilitate, through pre-agreed memoranda of understanding, easy deployment of skilled humanitarian staff across organisational boundaries.
The Disasters and Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP) invests in developing the longer-term capacity of people and their communities, in countries most at risk from natural disaster or conflict. This briefing paper explains our approach to locally-led crisis response.
How the Shifting the Power project is supporting shifts in government practice through advocacy and training
Oxfam's Kerry Ann Akers describes how CEDIER, a small Congolese NGO working Oxfam through the DEPP's Protection in Practice project, uses drama techniques to train communities in protection awareness and make them safer.
What happens when governments are overstretched due to the scale of an emergency and sheer size of the area they have to cover? Is this a time for international agencies to fly into an area they don’t know, or an opportunity to engage local knowledge and people?
Being prepared for a potential emergency, and having a response structure already in place, paid dividends for community health volunteers when an outbreak of diarrhoea hit a sprawling Nairobi settlement.
The Start Fund's Sarah Klassen visits a DEPP project led by Christian Aid in Myanmar, which is helping Start meet its Grand Bargain commitment to invest in strengthening national actors' ability to proactively prepare for disasters through early warning and risk analysis systems.
Through these two projects, Christian Aid has broadened its policy and practice for fragile settings (vulnerable areas of instability and insecurity, often following a period of conflict), moving from a primary focus on gender to wider social inclusion and resilience.
