Today (10 October) on International Day for Disaster Reduction, Tearfund and other NGO's have launched a new report to examine the characteristics of a disaster resilient community.

When designing the monitoring and evaluation for their DFID funded Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) projects, Tearfund, along with ActionAid, Christian Aid, Plan UK, Practical Action and British Red Cross asked the fundamental question: "What does a disaster resilient community look like?" Committed to grounding the Hyogo Framework for Action at the grassroots level, they were aware of management tools to help the high level implementation of the HFA, but nothing to show what a community looked like if all the actions of the Hyogo were carried out successfully by a government at the grassroots level.

They commissioned academic John Twigg and a team of researchers to look into all the literature (including Spanish) to create a set of generic indictors for their projects. The result they received was far more comprehensive and went beyond the development of just indicators. The research ending up describing the Characteristics of a Disaster Resilient Community and this served a far better function for the agencies to utilise. Not only could indicators be developed from the Characteristics, but the Characteristics could now be used for different applications at nearly all stages of the project cycle.

The Characteristics are multi hazard and designed to cover most community settings and scenarios. The agencies involved now have plans to use them to develop project design, create project specific indicators, assess community needs, undertake gap analyses of in house capacity and skills needed and finally, to support the evaluation process. A summary of the first edition for piloting was published and released for International Day for Disaster Reduction 10th October 2007.

The goal now is to field test the Characteristics in a minimum of 20 countries over the next 18 months. Being a desk based review, it is now essential that the Characteristics are endorsed and verified by those who they are most relevant to - the community. At the end of those 18 months the agencies will commission John Twigg to integrate all the feedback and produce a second edition ratified by field use. The agencies involved are now inviting other organisations, institutions and agencies to also field test and ratify the Characteristics either formally or informally. The invitation stretches from community based organisations through to high level donors as the Characteristics potentially are relevant to anyone working in the field of DRR.

For a copy of the Characteristics please go to:

http://www.benfieldhrc.org/disaster_studies/projects/communitydrrindicators/guidance_note.htm

To take part in the formal co-ordination of the field testing please contact: oenone.chadburn@tearfund.org no later than 10th November 2007. A co-ordination meeting will be held in London during late November.

For those who informally use the Characteristics, we would kindly ask you send any feedback on your experience to j.twigg@ucl.ac.uk