Disaster Management

While Sewalanka is primarily a development organization, our mandate is to work with disadvantaged or vulnerable communities. This means that we often work in areas that have been directly affected by disasters or are susceptible to future disasters. We have responded to both the man-made disaster of armed conflict and natural disasters like floods, landslides, droughts and the 2004 tsunami.

Our disaster management program incorporates three phases:

• Emergency response,
• Rehabilitation and recovery, and
• Risk reduction through awareness, planning and mitigation.

As a local organization, we feel we have a responsibility to bridge the gap between humanitarian aid and development assistance. We have developed a phased approach to help conflict and disaster-affected communities transition from dependence on relief aid to self-reliance and sustainable development.

When people have been 'internally displaced' (IDPs), the focus is on providing emergency relief to meet basic needs. In most cases, permanent resettlement takes time, so we help affected families transition to temporary sites where they can restart their livelihoods, enroll their children in schools, and begin returning to a normal life as quickly as possible. Once an affected community is resettled, we help them form and strengthen their own CBO so that they can address their own long-term needs. The CBO takes a lead role in planning and facilitating the recovery process. We help the community members use their CBO to access livelihood services and establish links with external resources and other organizations.

In our experience, participatory planning, social mobilization and psychosocial support are critical components of this transition. Most disaster-affected families have lost their material belongings, but they still have ideas and skills. Recognizing and drawing on their capabilities reduces dependency on relief aid and facilitates the recovery process. Even during the emergency response period, we mobilize people for participatory assessments, planning and decision making and organize committees for camp management.

Internationally, emergency response, reconstruction and development activities tend to be regarded as separate activities implemented by separate agencies under separate budget allocations. As a local organization, we are able to bridge this gap. We maintain our relationship with displaced communities and continue working with them as they recover from the disaster and begin to move towards a brighter future.