[MUSIC] Welcome to this session on humanitarian project design. And in this session, we're going to start by talking about the planning cycle. So our learning objectives for this session is to emphasize why planning is necessary for emergencies, and this is a difficult area for some people to understand. We're going to then compare the different approaches, contingency planning with an all-hazard approach. Then we'll ask you to be able to draw out and label the various parts of a planning cycle. When we finish, we want you to be able to explain how the planning cycle can be applied to the disaster cycle, and we'll do a little review about the disaster cycle. We want you also to be able to demonstrate where the Sphere Standards connect with the various parts of the planning cycle. Often we here the terms projects and programs used interchangeably, but we want you to be able to say how they really differ from each other. And then finally, we want to talk about what's necessary to close out a project. So this discussion is built on the Sphere Standards. If you haven't downloaded these already, you can go to the online library and download it from there, or you can go to the website, which is www.spherestandards.org. So one of the series of questions that always comes up for disasters is, can we really plan for disasters? After all, things are always changing, and you can't really plan for what you don't know would happen. And maybe if you plan for one disaster, then perhaps another disaster would occur, and maybe you've just wasted your time. So here's a photograph of the Presidential Palace in Haiti collapsing after an earthquake. And the past advisor's saying, but we were planning for floods, and not for an earthquake. So how can we be prepared for something like this? And we're reminded of the words of the great scientist, pioneering scientist Louis Pasteur, who said, chance favors the prepared mind. And we can apply that to disaster planning as well. The mere fact that we're thinking about the planning, and trying to understand how a disaster is going to affect the population and what their needs might be will help us be prepared for any type of disaster that we might encounter. We've taken this idea a bit further over the years, and created something called the all-hazards approach to disaster planning. And this makes us prepared for all those hazards that are possible or probable in a specific location. So it might not be all the hazards that could occur, perhaps, in the solar system, but that would occur in a specific area, and to be prepared for those. So these could be things like chemical events, or natural hazards, or violence and conflict, or transport and industrial disasters. So we'd be prepared for a number of things, and we do this by basing our planning on a risk analysis, and to try to understand what our vulnerabilities are to common hazards. And once that we have this in place, then we identify what are the commonalities among the possible hazards. And then we look at how do we mitigate or prevent, and how do we prepare response plans for these various disasters that could occur? And where they are common, then we look at the same approach for all of them. And then where they differ from each other, then we'll look at a separate section in our plans that will deal with the unique needs of a specific hazard, such as certain chemical events, or radiation events, and so forth. The intent of the all-hazard approach is to maximize available resources to meet the possible or probable disaster needs. So we haven't wasted a lot of resources, but we've tried to concentrate resources that will address our needs, regardless of what the type of disaster that is occurring. Now, this contrasts with the contingency planning approach. Now, a contingency planning approach looks at one specific hazard, anticipates that, and then creates a plan around that one potential hazard. And this is actually a much easier thing to do because there's only really one possible approach. And we can work out the quantities and needs that are anticipated for this, and make provisions for that. However, if some other type of disaster occurs, then we're in serious problems. And I took this picture from the China side of the North Korea border, looking across into North Korea. And a number of organizations had created contingency plans for what happened if large numbers of refugees came across this bridge or came across this river into China, and how to deal with their needs. But this actually never happened. But in the meantime, a number of floods occurred, and these organizations were unprepared to address the needs for floods. Although some of the responses might have been common between both the floods and the flood of refugees coming across from North Korea. So here's some ways to look at an all-hazard approach to disaster planning. And we think about how the impact of a possible hazard could affect various populations based upon their vulnerabilities. So we can approach this by looking at building codes. So if we're in an earthquake area, we want to be sure that buildings don't collapse, and so this is addressed by addressing building codes. And then we look at issues such as standby power sources. So whether we have an earthquake, whether we have a flood, or storms, or high winds, we may lose power. So a standby power source is going to be important, regardless of the nature of the hazard. There are also increasing problems with complicated patient records and facility records. So regardless of what the hazard is that is occurring, we need to be able to have these backed up in the cloud so we can access them when we need. There are emergency transport plans, emergency communication plans, and surge capacities for hospitals that need to be planned for, regardless of what the potential disaster might be. And in this photograph of the emergency department of the National University Hospital of Singapore, we can see a number of beds outside that emergency department. So this emergency department is prepared for a surge of mass casualties. Regardless of whether this is SARS, or an airplane crash, or some major infectious disease, the hospital is prepared for that. Another way that we look at an all-hazard approach is to think about what are the commonalities. So both a flood and a toxic spill may require evacuating populations and meeting their physical needs for water, for sanitation, for food, and for shelter. There's also a need for emergency medical supplies. So buffer stocks, as we've seen in this picture, can be built up. So if there's a sudden demand as a population is displaced, we will have the resources to draw down on to meet these particular needs. But the technical responses might be different. So that's why we mentioned before that we may also need to have on hand the specific skills for a specific type of disaster that might occur. Here we have a diagram of the disaster cycle, just to remind ourselves of this. And organizations that are dealing with disasters need to have the capacity to respond to multiple parts of this disaster cycle. So an organization should be able to help a population area or a group of people to prepare for a disaster. They should be able to help people in the face of a disaster, and what are their immediate needs, and how to respond to those. The organization should also be able to face the issues in recovery, which are much different than the immediate response. However, and very unfortunately, most of the emphasis is usually on the response. So areas such as preparedness often get short shrift or short attention from our planners because they're focused more on the response. These other sectors, particularly in recovery or mitigation, which means rebuilding in a way that will strengthen the response in the next disaster, they don't get the attention. Because they don't have the glamour of the response. The mitigation steps have to be planned very carefully. So we want to be sure that we don't increase the risks of a population in the next disaster. Sometimes we have seen this after earthquakes, when there's a great urge to rebuild housing, and this housing is built rapidly, and not built to standard building codes. So the next earthquake that comes along may actually put the population at greater risk than before. Preparedness is reducing the disaster risks, and being sure that the measures are in place to lessen the impact of future hazards, whatever their nature are. So these are things that organizations like the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies do a lot of. Reminding you to have an emergency kit in case there's a power failure, reminding you to have enough water on hand in case there's a sudden loss of water pressure in the system. So now let's look at the planning cycle, and how we can use this basic planning cycle for the process of being not only prepared for disasters, but responding to them as well. And again, these are based on the principles in the Sphere Standards. So planning is needed at the start of every activity. So whether this is at the onset of the emergency, or if there's a major change in the needs of a population that has been affected by an emergency, then we need to do planning at this point. This is also something that we will use in the post-emergency state, when many of the immediate needs have been met, but new needs are evolving in various ways. And populations are thinking about returning back home, and they need assistance in resettling to where they had been evacuated from. So we would use things in that way as well. And this helps us to understand the sequence of events, so things happen in the appropriate sequence, and they don't get out of synchrony with each other. So this cycle can also help us to create teams as we need. Now, the disaster management situation is something that very much depends upon teams. Because teams bring different skills, and different experiences, and different perspectives to the planning cycle. So this helps us understand where we need to have people with good monitoring skills, where we need to have people who have evaluation and analytic skills. And where we have people that can go do rapid assessments in a very short period of time, often in difficult situations. Now, we mentioned this subject of cycle time. Cycle time is how long does it take from the initial assessment to actually putting things into place, assisting the population, and then completing our initial goals and objectives. Now, in many development programs, this may be four or five years, but in a disaster situation, cycle time is very short. It may only be 6 or 12 months, and by that period of time, the population that's been affected by the disaster has transitioned to a different status. They may have returned home, or they may be long-term displaced populations, in which we need to have another approach to our planning process. So even in the post-emergency phase, we often talk in 6 or 12-month cycle times. Sometimes it's done in a short period of time because this is the period of time in which funding is available for a disaster program. So the planning cycle can be used at any stage in the disaster. So we could use, say, the planning stage to look at how would we devise an alert system that would protect the population in the case of a sudden onset disaster. We can use this planning cycle to look at how can we make a recovery process that will build back the essence of the society in a better way than they were before the disaster. So at any phase, we can use this. Organizations tend to have various types of disaster planning cycles. And what I've illustrated here in this slide is a very generic planning approach that can be used in many types of situations. Because regardless of the type of element that an organization has, they all have the same component. And in this slide, we can see a number of different types of planning cycles. Now, all of these have the same basic components. But one of them has the logo of UNICEF, another one comes from USAID, another one comes from UNHCR, but they're basically all the same components. So if we follow along what we're talking about in this lecture, we'll be in good shape. Now, in this slide, I want to illustrate the two different approaches to dealing with disasters. Do we have a project, or do we have a program? And on the left side, we have the project cycle, and here we receive a certain amount of funding, and we have a certain mandate. We go out and do this through our various projects that we've designed using this project cycle or planning cycle. And then at the end, we close this out and either discontinue operations or move into a different phase. This is a very typical approach for non-government organizations. So if MSF or if International Rescue Committee were to go to respond to an emergency someplace, this is exactly the pattern that they would use. They would start it up with an assessment, they would perform the project, and then they would exit. However, in the UN system, things are a bit different. There an assessment may be made, and then it will be determined how many resources are necessary. And then an existing program will open a new operation or a new office in a particular area, and will continue there until the population needs have been met. And then this program will move off to another location, carry out a different activity. So this continuing program process is something more characteristic of UN agencies. So we'll take a break here, and then when we come back, we'll talk about how we get started with the basic assessments. [MUSIC]
