February 4, 2010
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has selected DARA to carry out an Inter-Agency Real-Time Evaluation (IA-RTE) of the humanitarian response to the recent typhoons Ketsana and Parma in the Philippines.
The typhoons which hit the Philippines on September 26 and October 6 2009, respectively, affected more than 8.4 million people as well as causing massive damage to infrastructure. The large-scale disaster, of an unusual magnitude for the country, produced a large Flash Appeal.
This IA-RTE is the world’s fourth and will provide insight on the current situation, including real-time feedback and learning to the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) and to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) on a local level, and to the IASC Interest Group (IFRC, FAO, OCHA, UNDP, UNFPA, UNHABITAT , UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP and WHO) on an international level.
The main objectives will be to learn from the initial phase of the response and identify lessons that need to be taken forward into the programme, providing the means for field and headquarters staff to undertake corrective action in real time as the response evolves. The IA-RTE results aim to support the ongoing operational planning of the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), the main user of the process and recommendations. Overall the IA-RTE will focus on the effectiveness and efficiency of the current response’s coordination and management systems, and on requesting feedback from beneficiaries on the already achieved results.
DARA will carry out desk reviews, field visits and interviews with stakeholders. The organization has vast experience in both response to natural disasters and Real-Time Evaluations. In 2007 DARA participated in the real-time evaluation of the IASC response to the cyclone and floods in Mozambique; one of the first of its kind and a pilot RTE for a broader programme of such evaluations. DARA also peer-reviewed ALNAP’s guide to RTE evaluations, the world’s first publically available on the subject.
In recent years, inter-agency real-time evaluations have proved very useful in improving humanitarian response. An IA-RTE is an evaluation carried out at the early response stages of a humanitarian operation, simultaneously feeding back its findings for immediate use by the humanitarian community at the field level. Their purpose is to unlock inter-agency coordination problems or operational bottlenecks as they occur.
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