Promoting Safer Building - Using science, technology, communication and humanitarian practice to support family and community self-recovery

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Poorly constructed buildings are often the largest cause of injury, trauma and death in the event of a natural disaster. Most families rebuild houses relying on their own resources, with little or no external support. They "self-recover". An analysis of statistics shows that the impact of aid agencies on housing recovery rarely reaches more than 20% of affected families and is frequently in single figures (Parrack, 2014). Moreover, much of that support is in the form of temporary housing intended to last only a few years. Therefore, we know that 80%, or more, self-recover.The potential impact is huge: any one emergency can leave hundreds of thousands of families homeless, with women and girls disproportionately affected (Bradshaw, 2015). As things stand, these homes are too often rebuilt using the same pre-disaster bad practice that caused so much death, injury and economic damage in the first place.Currently, shelter professionals lack understanding of the recovery process and therefore of inherent opportunities for appropriate and effective support. Families choose when and how to rebuild based on little-understood circumstances. Empowering them in the exercise of informed choice is integral to assisting self-recovery. There are neither tools nor knowledge to effectively support this at scale. The challenge for the humanitarian community, as well as national and local organisations, is to support this inevitable process of self-recovery.While efforts are made to include Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) into many emergency and recovery shelter interventions, these activities are often very narrow in scope, frequently limited to the printing of simple guidance sheets. These have very little impact on resilience of self-built housing stock.We know that simply informing people about risk - poor engineering, construction, and hazard risk - does not result in changed behaviour (van Wijk 1995), or in better, safer homes and communities. We also know there are no universal solutions. Evidence from post-disaster needs-assessments shows that families rapidly rebuild their homes with little or no knowledge of safer building techniques or the environmental factors that may increase their vulnerability. However there is evidence that demand for technical assistance can be very high soon after a rapid onset disaster. Only 12% of respondents interviewed for a CARE Nepal survey were able to name any techniques for improving seismic performance of a house, but 60% listed building safety as a top concern.Currently, the international aid community lacks skills to adequately contextualise each unique situation, arrive rapidly and reliably at key technical messages and effectively transmit and promote those messages in a way that allows informed choice and ensures maximum acceptance by the affected population. Current post-disaster programmes do not systematically or effectively address the motivations (want), resources (can) and abilities (know-how) of beneficiaries in the process of self-recovery.Through the multidisciplinary research of scientists, engineers and humanitarian practitioners, this proposal addresses the needs of those who self-build. It specifically addresses two important gaps:- Technical best practice - what key construction and siting messages will make a substantial improvement to self-building in different contexts?- Changing current practice - getting the message across; what communication and promotion methods really work; learning from current technology transfer and public education approaches.References:Parrack, C; Flinn, B and Passey, M (2014): Open House Internationalvan Wijk, C; Murre, T (1995): UNICEFBradshaw, S., Fordham, M., (2015): Elsevier