Objective 1: the field

While the humanitarian community has made significant progress through emergency preparedness and response initiatives, significant challenges remain. The 2004 tsunami highlighted a chronic problem: fragmentation and poor coordination plague the sector. Furthermore, the sector faces a chronic problem of a lack of pragmatic tools and training. Also, there is an inconsistent integration of academic research and field needs. Addressing these three major challenges requires the response of the sector as a whole.

To address these challenges, the ECB project aims to improve the emergency preparedness and response capacity at the field level. To this end, ECB II has selected five pilot disaster-prone countries and regions to form country consortia, including IWG country offices, other agencies, local partners, communities, and government actors to improve emergency preparedness and response collaboratively. These five consortia are: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Horn of Africa, Indonesia, and Niger. These consortia will:

• improve their performance in recruiting, retaining, developing, and deploying skilled staff;
• increase their accountability to affected populations and communities;
• decrease the risks from disasters through local and national government policy changes;
• improve the coping mechanisms of participating communities;
• improve the coordination in preparedness and response;
• develop agreements and work towards implementing joint response activities; and
• gather data and document lessons for sharing with global agencies and sectors.

Ultimately, at the field level, lives will be saved, livelihoods will be protected, and recovery from disaster will be faster and less expensive. Field-level work is the largest of the three components of ECB Phase II.

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