Emergency & Recovery

“It is in the least developed countries that humanitarian emergencies have the greatest impact and these are the countries that are least able to respond and recover.”
White Paper on Irish Aid, pg 34

The Challenge

Each year natural disasters and complex emergencies bring suffering to millions of people across the world. Hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters alone claim an average of 60,000 lives each year. In 2005, on account of both the Asian tsunami and the earthquake in Pakistan, this figure rose to over 350,000.

At a time of great global wealth, when rapid technological advances demonstrate mankind’s capacity to innovate and solve previously insoluble problems, people are demanding better global responses to humanitarian emergencies.

Poor people are not unaware of the risks they face, living along seismic fault lines, in semi-arid desert, on flood plains or close to conflict. These people are acutely aware of the risks they face every day, but they are trapped by poverty into living with these risks.

Ireland’s Response

Irish Aid has as one of its key priorities the provision of support for developing countries suffering from natural disasters and other humanitarian emergencies. Irish Aid is now an increasingly substantial player in the emergency response and recovery sectors. There are two schemes under which emergency and recovery assistance is provided.

Emergency Humanitarian Assistance:
The objective of Emergency Humanitarian Assistance is to save and protect lives in emergency situations through the provision of emergency relief. This objective is underscored by the following key principles:
• a commitment to international humanitarian law
• a commitment to assisting people in greatest need
• regular independent evaluations of humanitarian programmes
• predictable and adequate funding.  

Irish Aid provides support to the following types of emergencies:
Acute emergencies - recent examples include earthquakes in Gujarat and El Salvador, floods in Mozambique and Bangladesh.
Chronic Emergencies- recent examples include Angola, Somalia, south Sudan, Sierra Leone.
Complex Emergencies-recent examples include Afghanistan and Iraq.
New variant emergencies – examples include Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Assistance is mainly channelled through; Irish and International NGOs, UN bodies such as WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR and International organisations such as the Red Cross.

Recovery Assistance:
There is a natural and logical progression from supporting the acute phase of emergencies to supporting early recovery in a more strategic and longer term manner. A combined approach of this kind has been evident in Irish Aid's involvement in East Timor and Afghanistan.  In addition the traditional objectives of recovery assistance will also be maintained - helping people to re-establish their livelihoods in the wake of conflicts/disasters including through meeting basic needs, of food security, shelter etc.

Recovery assistance is designed to address the material consequences of the conflict or the disaster and to accelerate the recovery process from the initial emergency, through recovery and reconstruction towards long-term development. Irish Aid places strong emphasis on developing the foundation blocks that lead to sustainable social and economic development, good governance and respect for and promotion of human rights.

During the critical recovery period funding is targeted at meeting basic needs and supporting institutional capacity building and the strengthening of governance and civil society. Assistance is also provided to support the re-integration of displaced persons and demobilised soldiers and to do so in a way that is inclusive and supports reconciliation in divided societies. Traditionally Irish Aid's engagement in Recovery Countries was mainly based on supporting disparate projects submitted by NGOs and International Agencies usually within a six to twelve month timeframe. East Timor was the first recovery country where Irish Aid developed a post conflict country strategy. An initial 18 month transitional country strategy was approved.  This programme was successfully implemented and as a result a subsequent three year country strategy was developed and approved in March 2003. Over a three year period (2000 – 2003) DCI’ engagement in East Timor has moved from a project based intervention to a multi-annual programme based government to government strategy, with the key objective of assisting the Government of East Timor and civil society to achieve the vision set out in their national Development Plan.

Irish Aid’s programme in East Timor is an example of a new strategic approach to recovery assistance and is now the model for Irish Aid involvement in other countries coming out of conflict – Afghanistan being the most recent example.