Financial Times

Bigger private sector roles in tsunami recovery
Greater private sector participation is needed to help tsunami survivors rebuild their businesses and generate alternative livelihoods, according to a senior researcher who has worked in the tsunami reconstruction effort and has just helped do a study on the problem.

Private sector activity right now is large confined to business training but there is scope for it to more directly contribute, said Professor Marcus Karunanayake, senior researcher at the Centre for Development Research in the Royal Institute and emeritus professor of geography, University of Sri Jayewardenepura.

“The private sector could support tsunami survivors by being service providers – supplying skills, materials, enabling market links. These are areas which the government should look at in its long-term strategy. The government should give incentives to motivate the private sector to be service providers for micro-enterprises.”

There is a need to create space for collective action since individual approaches create problems as found in the fishing industry. There, research done by the centre on post-tsunami livelihood recovery and alternative employment options found that well-meaning efforts by NGOs to help fishermen revive their livelihood had led to problems.

Karunanayake said NGOs had distributed single-day fishing boats to individual fishermen in some areas with the result that they all went out and came back with a meagre catch as they competed with one another in limited fishing grounds.

“It would have been better had the fisherman organized themselves collectively and NGOs given multi-day fishing boats so that they could sail into the deep sea and return with a bigger catch. This would have been more economical.”

The tsunami recovery effort should focus on revival of lost livelihoods such as fishing as well as creation of new opportunities by providing alternative livelihoods, said Karunanayake, who served on the Tsunami Housing Reconstruction Unit under the Urban Development Ministry and was a member of the committee that examined housing constraints.

“We should look at it from the viewpoint of the opportunities it provides – to build anew, better than what existed before. But it is difficult to say to what extent we in Sri Lanka captured those opportunities. There appears to have been a lack of vision.”

He said that access to credit, micro-finance, training and support for entrepreneurs had not translated into coherent programmes. There is a need for policy consensus to guide different NGOs in the same direction, to meet the micro-credit needs of survivors and to train beneficiaries.

“We found some NGOs giving sophisticated equipment with no training – so the beneficiaries were unable to use them.” Also, the cash-for-work programme was not well co-ordinated with the house re-building programme.

Much has been done to help tsunami survivors but there is no effective road map that is needed for planning of recovery processes for natural disasters of this magnitude.

Karunanayake said the government was forced to create a special institution, TAFREN, to oversee tsunami rehabilitation and reconstruction as Sri Lanka lacked the institutional framework to cope with disasters.

“Undoubtedly, TAFREN did much good work in the immediate post-disaster phase, helped by NGOs but there were also weaknesses in structures and policies,” he said.

“This was because the new organization itself had to evolve policies through a learning process and has itself been going through changes. The fundamental problem is that they adopted a top-down approach. Often, some policies and strategies were not properly conveyed to the ground level people and officials and on occasion there were gaps between the ground reality and what TAFREN was trying to do.”

The institutional machinery proposed by TAFREN for coordination was somewhat deficient as it did not provide for the involvement of elected regional and local governments in the form of Provincial Councils and Pradheshiya Sabhas in the recovery programme.

Even in the new Disaster Management Act that was passed by parliament recently, local government officials still have no role to play in disaster management although they would be on the front line in case a disaster affects the people. Organisational weaknesses of TAFREN contributed to delays and weaknesses in post-tsunami recovery and TAFREN by-passed effective units of devolved government.

“This was particularly so in the north-east where, because of the conflict and LTTE presence, the capacity of the divisional and district secretariats was found wanting.” Prof Karunanakaye said one of the problems was that the areas affected by the tsunami were not homogenous and there were basic differences between the North and East and the South.

The South had a developed hinterland and the infrastructure losses were within manageable limits and confined to the coastal belt compared with the war-ravaged North-East where the hinterland was affected. These differences called for different strategies.

In Sri Lanka, it is only now that the government is setting up a Disaster Management Centre. Another problem that affected recovery was that many officials in affected areas lacked training and preparation to handle such disasters and were themselves traumatized and unable to gear themselves to the rehabilitation process.

This, coupled with loss of documents, created problems of implementation.
“Competencies required of officers for disaster management are more demanding than that of routine administration,” Prof Karunanayake said. “We found officials did not have the experience and training to implement disaster mitigation work and preparedness programmes.”

He described a recent UNDP project called Capacity Development for Recovery Programme (CADREP) as an important initiative.“But the problem is how to synchronise CADREP training with implementation needs of disaster recovery,” Prof Karunanayake said. Furthermore, systems have to be set-up to build and sustain institutional memory on disaster events so that the institutions with hindsight could quickly respond to disaster.

“There is a science and theory of disaster management. We need to rope in expertise such as from universities.” He also said the buffer zone policy had a very serious impact on the pace of recovery because it led to a great deal of indecision and created a lot of uncertainty.

It created problems of finding land and complicated livelihood problems.
Professor Karunanayake said that while NGOs had done quite a bit of good work in the immediate post-disaster and reconstruction and rehabilitation stages, there were also certain difficulties.

“There was a convergence of NGOs on particular locations to the neglect of others. Also, NGO work was hampered by the inability of government to give clear information.”

However, some problems were created by NGOs themselves as they were working on their own agendas without considering government policy.
Also, there were NGOs that mushroomed and did not have adequate capacity to do the required work.

The transition phase in tsunami recovery was prolonged because of procedural delays and lack of co-ordination among various organizations.
“Still, 55,000 transition houses were built – that’s an achievement,” said Prof Karunanayake. “In fairness to the government, it must be said that it did make efforts to expedite the housing programme.”

There was also the phenomenon of some survivors not wanting to leave their tents because they expected more relief to come.

The housing programme was also plagued by delays and confusion.
The construction of permanent houses is undertaken by donors on the basis of a MoU signed with the government under which the latter provides the land and infrastructure like road access, water and electricity to the construction site.

“But there were many problems - procedural delays in land acquisition, long delays in allocating land to the donors owing to land scarcity and difficulties in finding land because of the buffer zone.

“The problem was that the government was trying to meet an urgent situation through routine procedures. It made no allowances to short-circuit these procedures. By the time land was released some donors had lost interest and went elsewhere because of the delays.”

Also, some of the land identified for housing was found to be unsuitable for building or was found inadequate for the planned number of houses.
Delays had also been caused by the unwillingness of government agencies, for financial and other reasons, to readily comply with infrastructure provision – it wanted donors to provide electricity, water and road access.

There have also been instances of a few donors going back on their promises.
Other problems such as a surveyors strike for two months and disruption caused by the presidential poll contributed to the delay.

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