The evaluators would like to express their gratitude to all the staff and consultants as well as the governmental and non-governmental partners posted in Tangalle, Colombo, Banda Aceh, Meulaboh, Malé, Bangkok or Rome who played a major role in the success of this evaluation process. They did much more than just suffer our presence and patiently answer our questions. They constantly supported our efforts to document successes and failures alike, and allowed us to deepen the analysis in ways that would have been impossible without their eagerness to reflect on and learn from their own experience. This open spirit and tireless assistance in helping us understand and document complex issues and responses were and remain much appreciated. In turn, it is our hope that these efforts and support will not be in vain, and that the RTE will have a positive impact on the way FAO goes about implementing its emergency and rehabilitation programmes.

The large and complex FAO tsunami response was sometimes implemented in harsh conditions and always in a very fluid environment crowded by hundreds if not thousands of NGOs and other actors. Under these exceptional circumstances, the evaluators have tried to hold reasonable expectations of performance, and at times could broadly compare the performance of FAO with that of other actors in similar fields. However, the reader should understand that even though the report highlights a number of deficiencies and shortcomings, the evaluators are far from convinced that placed under similar circumstances, they could have managed this programme any better than the persons they were tasked to evaluate.

Executive Summary

On 26 December 2004, a massive earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra Island triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean, causing extensive damage to coastal communities and infrastructure across the entire region, with most of the impact felt in India, Indonesia, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The tsunami killed approximately 300,000 people, most of them in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. An estimated 2 million people have been directly or indirectly affected. Entire coastal infrastructures, resources and livelihood support systems were wiped out in Indonesia and seriously damaged in Sri Lanka. The loss of life and the magnitude of the damage were less severe in Thailand and in the Maldives, but still considerable. In all countries, the fisheries sector was the most severely affected. In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the disaster almost paralyzed the industry and the livelihoods of communities which depended on it, with extensive damage to boats, harbours and fish ponds. The agricultural sector was hit by seawater intrusions, the destruction or silting of coastal irrigation and drainage structures, damage to salt-sensitive crops, and the salinization of soils, wells and groundwater. Coastal forests were also affected.

This unprecedented emergency was met with an equally unprecedented response from donors and private citizens across the globe. Global commitments and contributions were estimated at US$15 billion in total, with donations from private citizens and foundations forming the overwhelming majority.

Methodology

The present report summarizes the results of the efforts of the FAO Evaluation Service to evaluate the tsunami response of the Organisation through a “Real Time Evaluation” (RTE) designed to provide feedback to programme managers at key junctures of the response. The RTE involved desk studies, surveys measuring beneficiary satisfaction, and three evaluation missions in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Maldives in May 2005, November 2005 and June 2006.

The RTE faced many challenges, chief among which stood the sheer size of the tsunami response. The volume of operation reviewed accounted for US$60 million, or 78% of the whole FAO tsunami response. In each country, the evaluation teams attempted to review in various degrees of detail all the operations, and visited project sites for a wide variety of sectors and activity types.

Resource mobilization and earmarking

So far, FAO has raised US$ 77 million in support of its tsunami response. Contributions were received from a number of non-traditional donors and even from private sector companies. This level of funding may seem quite significant by FAO standards, but it represented only 0.5% of the US$15 billion pledged to post-tsunami assistance worldwide.

The resource allocation per country and per sector appeared appropriate. The fisheries sector received two-third of the funds mobilized for the tsunami response. More could have been done to mobilise resources for the rehabilitation of paddy field and related irrigation and drainage infrastructure in Indonesia and to a lesser extent Sri Lanka. In Indonesia, sectoral allocations were almost evenly split between fisheries and agriculture, perhaps more as a result of the relative ease of implementation of the two sectoral programmes than as a reflection of the relative needs in each sector. Agriculture was a “good deliverer” very early on while fisheries struggled for a time to establish a viable modus operandi.

As of August 2006, the overall rate of financial delivery including hard commitments was 65%, a reasonable performance given the size and complexity of the portfolio. Half of all expenditures concerned procurement of equipment and inputs. The specific programmes in each country visited by the Real Time Evaluation are described in the body of the report.

Donor support was generally more flexible than in previous disaster responses, with some donors allowing for the allocation of funds to broad sectors or geographical areas. However, many donors still expressed geographical and sector preferences or restrictions which typically required the drafting, approval and management of several projects per donor. Funds channelled through the UN Flash Appeal had to be used in a limited timeframe (progressively extended from 6 months to a year, then to 18 months). In general, short-time donor horizon tended to negatively affect the response.

The Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities (SFERA) recently created by FAO played a critical role to speed up project implementation and cover strategic though yet unfunded needs, e.g. needs assessments or set up of Emergency and Rehabilitation Coordination Units (ERCUs) in the field. Overall, SFERA received some US$10 million for the purpose of the tsunami response and advanced US$5 million to fund procurement activities prior to the receipt of funds. However, the Fund’s accounting processes remain complex, manual and ad hoc, processes, in part because the way TCE uses the Fund has evolved over and beyond its original scope. Accounting and reporting requirements would need to be finalized before the accounting system can be automated.

Collaboration between FAO units

Headquarters, and the Regional Office for Asia-Pacific, which administered the FAO response in Thailand, played a significant role in the response. However, the RTE identified a “disconnect” (i.e. a need for more communication, collaboration and sometimes team spirit) between headquarters and field offices and between the various headquarters units involved in the tsunami response, linked with a scattered, project-based approach to damage assessments, resource mobilization, project design, implementation and reporting.

This “institutional disconnect” applied to all phases of the response, compounded by financial disincentives and by the fact that the FAO Fisheries Department had originally little working relationship with the Emergency Operations and Rehabilitation Division (TCE). The various mechanisms set up to coordinate the response considered a range of strategic and operational issues but did not elaborate corporate strategies with jointly-agreed goals and rules of engagement.

Damage and needs assessments

The technical expertise brought to bear by the Organization during early assessments (January 2005) was widely appreciated: FAO moved in quickly to assist governments in undertaking initial assessments in collaboration with the respective governments and other multilateral organizations (e.g. WB, UNDP). In Thailand and the Maldives, the damage and needs assessments organized jointly by FAO and the Government very early after the tsunami helped shape the Government response. A second phase of assessment occurred from the end of January to April 2005. A large number of missions were fielded, but results were sometimes far from optimal due to the absence of a holistic approach. Most of the damage and needs assessments were piece-meal, following sector and sub-sector technical lines, at the expense of cross-sectoral environmental, social and livelihoods issues.

The damage and needs assessments in Sri Lanka and Indonesia led by the FAO Investment Center in February-March 2005 in partnership with IFIs were noteworthy, as they were consolidated cross-sectorally, based on an overall economic and social analysis of the affected regions and sectors, and well communicated to partners, though FAO technical Departments should have been more closely involved.

A poor link has been identified between needs assessments and project design. The absence of experienced project planners or implementers in the assessment teams resulted in key elements for programme design not being addressed in the resulting needs assessment reports.

Initial needs assessments became rapidly obsolete in a very dynamic aid environment. Throughout the response, FAO has attempted to monitor the gradual recovery of the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka and to a lesser extent in Indonesia through various “recovery assessments” to help inform and direct national and international assistance to the victims. This work has been much noted and appreciated by partners, but could have been communicated more coherently and should have extended to the agriculture sector.

Operational Capacity

Many of the difficulties identified during the RTE and highlighted in this report find their roots in the insufficient operational capacity of the Organization, its excessive centralisation of authority and bureaucratic procedures. FAO’s performance in this regard was found lagging compared to that of other UN specialized agencies. Substantial bottlenecks in the tsunami programme were identified, which could and often do repeat themselves in other emergencies. Not all of these bottlenecks resulted from inflexible administrative procedures. In some cases, the capacity of TCE to set up field offices and provide them with the human and financial means necessary to achieve programme goals was also found insufficient.

Deployment of staff during the first few months was relatively rapid: Emergency Coordinators and other key staff were dispatched to the region by early January. It was during subsequent phases that most problems occurred. Instead of dispatching senior operational and technical staff for long periods of time to the field like many other UN agencies did, FAO resorted to hiring technical consultants with little familiarity with FAO project management procedures, backstopped by missions from headquarters. Mandatory breaks in service for international and national consultants proved a severe problem for programme implementation. In Indonesia, FAO has found it difficult to hire and retain a cadre of senior national staff and consultants, and this seriously handicapped the FAO response there.

Procurement

Procurements in the fisheries sector tended to be more complicated and less successful than in the agriculture sector, mainly due to the wide variety and complexity of fishing gear used in any given country. Moreover, most fisheries items were not available “off the shelf” and had to be built by the suppliers, which took time.

The speed in delivery of inputs and the technical soundness of items delivered also varied considerably from one country to the next, in relation to a number of factors (FAO’s organizational set-up, presence of the required goods on local markets, etc.), but also in relation with the procurement strategy adopted in a particular country. In Thailand, procurement was overwhelmingly conducted locally by the Regional Office, which benefited from a spending authority of US$100,000, and procurements were processed faster than in other countries. In the Maldives, items were purchased mainly through purchase orders raised at headquarters, since many of the selected supplies could not be obtained locally. In Indonesia, most distributed items were constructed or procured locally but the lack of financial authority of the Emergency Unit in Banda Aceh resulted in delayed payments to suppliers. In Sri Lanka, the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (MFAR) insisted on implementing a large boat repair programme through the parastatal Cey-Nor. Fishing gear for Sri Lanka could not be produced locally and had to be imported.

Excessive delivery pressure and over-optimistic schedules sometimes resulted in low-quality items being procured and/or distributed. Risks are especially high when distributed items are live (fingerlings, seed, saplings). In some instances, poor storage or handling resulted in low germination or survival rates, notably in Thailand (sea bass fingerlings) and Indonesia (rice and groundnut seed).

Partnerships

FAO forged partnerships with a wide array of stakeholders and organisations for the purpose of implementing its tsunami response. The proven capacity of the Organization to relate to and to work with a wide range of state and non-state actors at local, national and global levels is striking, even though its contractual arrangements may need substantial adjustments to make better use of this potential strength.

In all countries, the Government played a significant and generally useful role in orienting and often co-implementing the FAO-funded programme. Central and decentralized governments largely influenced the general approach followed by the FAO response, the programme deliverables and its beneficiary selection processes. The extent of this influence was probably strongest in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, average in Thailand and weakest in Indonesia.

The intensity of FAO’s relationship with NGOs could be characterised as inversely proportional to the strength of the relationship with the Government. In Sri Lanka and the Maldives, little role in delivery was left to non-state actors such as fishers' cooperatives or NGOs. Thailand presented a fairly balanced situation. In Indonesia, most of the FAO programme was implemented in partnership with national and international NGOs, at least in 2005. The Indonesia programme was also noteworthy in its efforts to work with traditional and community-based organisations. However, significant challenges were encountered when trying to contract those.

A number of educational and research institutions also participated in the FAO response, mainly in providing for training, surveys and studies, but also in sourcing planting material from provincial research centers in Sri Lanka and in helping iron out the selection of boat beneficiaries in Indonesia. Use of local capacity – supplemented by foreign expertise as and when necessary – was not only cost-effective in the short term, it may also prove to be the best way to build up local disaster mitigation capacity over the longer term through learning-by-doing.

The cooperation with IFIs (World Bank, IFAD and the ADB) in damage and needs assessments, leading to the preparation of recovery strategies in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, was found very useful. Cooperation with other UN agencies was significant in Sri Lanka and in Thailand, but weaker in Indonesia.

Support to sectoral coordination

Coordination of emergency and early rehabilitation assistance in the agriculture sector has been a classic function for FAO since the mid 1990’s. In the tsunami response, some governments and donors expected FAO to play a strong coordination role in fisheries and agriculture. The need for coordination was certainly felt by all, as the tsunami disaster generated a massive influx of private and public funds and hundreds of NGOs, private sector organisations, donors and agencies quickly crowded the affected coastline.

According to the context and experience of the respective FAO Emergency Coordinator as well as the resources available, FAO played different coordinating roles in each of the four countries, with the most substantial and convincing efforts witnessed in Sri Lanka and to a lesser extent Indonesia. These efforts were generally limited to information sharing, advocacy, and promotion of a more even geographic coverage in the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka. Strongly supported by the Government and widely appreciated by key actors, FAO’s ambitious attempt in Sri Lanka achieved good visibility but nevertheless failed to bring much order to the overall tsunami recovery efforts of all stakeholders and to control excessive delivery of fishing assets. In Indonesia, FAO’s coordination efforts were deemed to be useful and the link with BRR was appreciated by IFIs and NGOs, although participation from NGOs was lower than in Sri Lanka.

Harmonizing the activities of hundreds of NGOs and charitable organisations, who all had their own donors and independent interventions, represented an insurmountable task. Whether NGOs should be better coordinated other than voluntarily is also debatable since independence is one of their major strengths.

Beneficiary selection

In the agricultural sector, communities in all countries tended to spread the FAO assistance farther than intended in project documents, i.e. to share the predefined packages when they were easy to split (seed, fertilizer) with a much larger group of beneficiaries than intended, as a way to help maintain a social balance and share amongst other villagers who were also recognized to have lost. This trend even applied to large assets (e.g. tractors, cows): some benefiting communities opted for collective ownership of the assets in an attempt to reduce conflicts.

However, this tendency to share or redistribute assets was limited to assets contributing to the reconstruction of self-subsistence activities (paddy, small scale vegetable production, and to a certain extent livestock). It applied much less to commercial and competitive domains (commercial vegetable production, fish drying, and boats and fishing gear), in which case the tendency for elite capture was harder to resist.

Women did not receive sufficient attention during the first half of 2005, largely because most of the damage was in the fisheries sector and the focus FAO chose was on repairing or replacing boats and gear for fishermen. Later on, nutritional training in Sri Lanka reached 2,000 beneficiaries, almost all of whom were women, and support was provided to Indonesian fish dryers, 30% of whom were female. In the agricultural sector, the women met by the RTE missions considered they had received their due share of assistance. Widows were systematically included as input beneficiaries for staple crops and women constituted an important proportion of beneficiaries whenever cash crops were concerned.

Impacts on the restoration of livelihoods

Although the tsunami response was much more varied and included more technical assistance than previous FAO emergency operations, it still tended to be dominated by the delivery of physical assets to individual producers, at the expense of: a) community infrastructures; b) non-production segments of the value chain even when these were severely affected by the tsunami (e.g. marketing and food processing)i; c) technical assistance and capacity building.

Physical assistance, when it responds to real and pressing needs, helps rebuild livelihoods. It also establishes commitment, credibility, visibility and funding. Governments and communities expected tangible, concrete assistance. However, FAO’s administrative limitations add to the risk of failure in ambitious supply, procurement or construction programmes. There are many other organisations capable of distributing production inputs at a lower transaction cost, while FAO can provide good quality technical expertise, capacity building and coordination services in the areas of its mandate in a way few others can. When present, FAO’s policy guidance and capacity building activities were often much appreciated, particularly in the fisheries sector.

Overall, the FAO tsunami response assisted an estimated 110,000 farming and fishing households (approximately 500,000 persons) affected by the tsunami, through various asset distributions and repairs. FAO was able to respond to the emergency convincingly in the agriculture sector in all countries visited by the RTE, helping a majority of affected farmers restore their capital assets and livelihoods through the distribution of generally appropriate seeds, tree saplings, fertilizer, tools and livestock. The damage in the agriculture sector was less severe than in the fisheries sector, and hence the task at hand was less difficult. In Sri Lanka for instance, it was reported that FAO could assist almost all affected farmers in one way or another.

However, the connected issues of drainage and salinity in Indonesia and to a lesser extent in Sri Lanka were left largely unattended. The cash-for-work modality was used to clear two paddy areas near Banda Aceh from debris and silt, but with only partial success. The experiment did not go any further. Much coastal irrigation and drainage infrastructure along the west coast of Aceh were still in need of rehabilitation during the third RTE mission in mid-2006, which reduced the impact of the FAO rice seed distribution.

The performance in the fisheries sector was less convincing than in agriculture. The contrast between the two sectors largely reflects the long FAO experience with agricultural emergencies contrasted with a lack of such experience in fisheries. Sri Lanka represented the most creative and convincing attempt at rebuilding fisheries through a mix of sectoral coordination, technical assistance and the repair and distribution of generally suitable assets. However, it was also the most contentious. Key elements of the FAO response, such as support to the boat repair programme of Cey-Nor, were provided very early by short-cutting FAO’s procedures. This may have been the price to pay for contributing significantly to the reconstruction of fishing capacity. There were a number of other problems as well: a beneficiary selection process which tended to be politically influenced, a lack of quality spare parts for the repair of engines, and a delayed procurement of fishing gear. In spite of these drawbacks however, it is clear that FAO contributed significantly to the recovery of the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka.

The same statement cannot be made in the case of Indonesia, in spite of useful contributions such as the training in boatbuilding and the improvements to traditional boat designs. In aquaculture, rehabilitation work was useful in restoring production capacity. In fish processing, the programme has helped in restarting economic activity where the fish supply was available. However, deliverables in capture fisheries were few and late and came at a prohibitively high transaction cost.

In Thailand, impact in the fisheries sector suffered at least initially from incorrect asset specifications and in the case of aquaculture, high seabass seed mortality rates. In the Maldives, the fisheries sector largely recovered by itself, with boat owners undertaking most of the boat and engine repairs.

Impact on natural resources

The fishing gear distributed by FAO was generally in accordance with sustainable fishing practices and should not lead to serious problems. The FAO aquaculture rehabilitation programme in Aceh appropriately focussed on the reconstruction of pre-existing fish pounds in areas outside the green belt instituted by the Government.

More broadly speaking, much has been said about the likely negative impact on fish stocks of excessive fishing capacity created by the great amount of gear distribution and boat building by all actors. However, not all these assets are usable. It was estimated that 15% to 20% of all small boats repaired and replaced by all agencies and charities in Sri Lanka are currently unusable because of faulty design or poor repair. In Banda Aceh, the Panglima Laot Provincial Office estimated that 20% of all newly constructed small boats would never be used because of poor stability. Another factor limiting the fishing effort has been the high fuel prices over the last two years.

Transition to reconstruction and development

In each of the countries covered by the evaluation, FAO has introduced long-term concerns in its emergency and early rehabilitation work and has developed a series of long-term project concept notes. There is significant demand from governments and other stakeholders for a prolonged involvement of FAO, either to meet deferred reconstruction needs or to engage in purely developmental activities. However, FAO was not able to mobilize large development resources to follow up on its tsunami rehabilitation programme. This may at least in part reflect donors’ priorities, as all tsunami-affected countries belong to the middle-income group and the tsunami disaster has already received far more resources than other crises elsewhere.

Recommendations

Funding arrangements:

1. FAO should review the scope of SFERA operations and the reporting requirements of FAO management, individual donors and governing bodies, and should implement appropriate solutions including financial set-up so as to automate accounting.

2. FAO should continue to raise the awareness of donors on how useful SFERA was, on the advantages of flexibility and on the cost of conditionality.

3. FAO and other organizations involved in livelihood rehabilitation should plead the case for longer timeframes in consolidated appeals before OCHA and the IASC.

Operational capacity:

4. FAO should delegate to FAORs a greater delegation of authority for Letters of Agreement (LoAs) and procurement and set up impress accounts in emergency operations of significant size.

5. In parallel, FAO should continue to invest in administrative skills, operational capacity and control mechanisms at the national level (i.e. in FAORs and ERCUs).

6. For significant emergency and rehabilitation programmes, both TCE and Technical Departments should deploy experienced staff to the field level. This should be part of TORs for TCE Operations Officers.

7. TCE should stockpile standard equipment for rapid office set up when a disaster strikes (office-in-a-box).

8. FAO’s rules imposing mandatory breaks in consultancy contracts should be waived for emergency projects, and the recruitment of national consultant and staff should always be handled in the field.

9. The optimal ERCU composition should strike a balance between international and national staff of sufficient seniority and authority.

Damage and needs assessments:

10. In large-scale emergencies, FAO should conduct holistic damage and needs assessments for all areas within its mandate, communicate them to all partners through consolidated documents, and should strive to carry them out in cooperation with the concerned governments and other international organizations.

11. Needs assessment reports should attempt to cover an inventory of key assets that were not damaged and that could be used to jump-start the recovery; an analysis of non-production segments of market chains affected by the disaster; an identification of the most affected and vulnerable groups; and a clear articulation between FAO’s proposed role and priorities.

12. In the tsunami response as well as in other contexts, FAO should try to provide regular recovery assessments in areas of its mandate for two to three years after the disaster.

Strategy setting and programmatic approaches:

13. In major emergency operations involving the participation of a large number of FAO units, FAO must develop explicit corporate strategies and goals for the Organisation as a whole.

Balance between intervention types:

14. FAO should help recapitalize food producers and processors during the initial nine to twelve months of a response to a natural disaster, through the distribution of new equipment or by repairing damaged equipment. The procurement of simple production inputs such seed or fertilizer should be gradually phased out thereafter.

15. There is a need for stronger emphasis on “software” but also on the provision of more diversified “hardware” (e.g. rehabilitation of small infrastructure and of entire food and value chains).

16. In fast-paced emergency and reconstruction contexts, FAO should be prepared to provide timely and clear policy advice on pressing reconstruction issues relevant to its mandate. Capacity building activities need to be hands-on and focussed on key capacity gaps of other actors involved in the reconstruction process.

Procurement and input delivery:

17. Tenders should be analysed against a variety of pre-set criteria, including the track record of the bidders with FAO, and criteria used more for guidance than as a straight jacket.

18. Splitting procurements in small quantities ordered on the basis of regular recovery assessments would reduce the risk of failure and help test and fine-tune programme implementation modalities.

19. Training material should be designed and in-depth procurement training provided to local and international staff dealing with purchasing and pre-purchasing functions in the field.

20. FAO should use voucher schemes on a more significant scale.

21. For large-scale emergency and early rehabilitation programmes, technical clearance should be delegated to country offices, if necessary by deploying technical officers to the field.

Participatory approaches:

22. FAO should continue to develop rapid consultation processes for utilizing livelihoods approaches and practical steps for implementation under rehabilitation and reconstruction contexts.

23. Cross-sectorality should be promoted selectively, focusing on precise issues that can only be successfully addressed this way. Synergies tapped by working cross-sectorally should offset the additional cost, time and complexity.

Beneficiary selection:

24. Disaster-stricken activities performed by women should be supported on par with men’s activities. Female-headed households should receive their fair share of distributed assets. FAO should strive to reach out to the poorest segments of society in its input distribution programmes, without excluding the better-off.

25. For small or sharable assets (e.g. seeds and fertilizer), a simple beneficiary selection process facilitated by an NGO and involving local officials and community members should suffice.

26. When assets are costly and/or unlikely to being redistributed, beneficiary selection should be carefully planned, conducted and monitored. The beneficiary lists provided by local authorities and village heads should be systematically checked by a neutral third party.

Strategic and operational partnerships:

27. Stand-by partnership agreements should be explored with INGOs, with the United Nations Joint Logistics Center to help develop FAO’s logistical capacity, and with WFP to subcontract some logistical functions (storage, transport).

28. A new, simpler project document format should replace the LoA in most instances, displaying the financial or in-kind contributions of FAO and of its implementing partner(s), and emphasising the fact that the project is a joint effort by FAO and one or several partner(s) rather than a mere sub-contracting relationship.

Sectoral coordination:

29. FAO should continue to convene national coordination meetings in its areas of competence. Meetings should be open to all actors, neutral, well-documented and sharply focussed on issues requiring coordination.

30. In each country or crisis, FAO should seek a progressive build up in terms of intensity of coordination, starting with information exchange, and moving on to advocacy, standard setting and, ultimately, trying to promote innovative collaboration.

Monitoring and communication:

31. TCE should develop standard monitoring processes by intervention type, involving a simple reporting system for implementing partners, regular beneficiary surveys contracted to teams of well-trained third-party enumerators, rudimentary mapping of programme areas and results and frequent visits to programme sites.

32. In future crises, FAO should provide mapping and remote sensing services over a longer period, in partnership with the UN Humanitarian Information Center (UNHIC).

Part I – Background Information

1. Introduction

On 26 December 2004, a massive earthquake of magnitude 9.3 and a series of aftershocks off the west coast of Sumatra Island, Indonesia, triggered a series of tsunami across the Indian Ocean, causing extensive damage to coastal communities and infrastructure across the entire region, with most of the impact felt in India, Indonesia, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania were affected to a lesser degree. The tsunami killed approximately 300,000 people, most of them in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, making it the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. An estimated 2 million people have been directly or indirectly affected. Damage and destruction to infrastructure harmed people's livelihoods and left many homeless or without adequate water, sanitation, food or healthcare facilities.

Indonesia, located closest to the epicentre, suffered from both the earthquake and the tsunami. An estimated 170,000 people were killed and about 400,000 displaced. Entire coastal infrastructures, resources and livelihood support systems were wiped out, particularly along the west coast of the Aceh Province. In Sri Lanka, the disaster claimed over 30,000 lives and displaced about 200,000. The loss of life and the magnitude of the damage were less severe in Thailand and in the Maldives, but still considerable.

In all countries, the fisheries sector was the most severely affected. In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the disaster almost paralyzed the industry and the livelihoods of communities which depended on it, with extensive damage to boats, harbours and fish ponds. The agricultural sector was hit by seawater intrusions, the destruction or silting of coastal irrigation and drainage structures, complete damage to salt sensitive crops and fruit trees, and the salinization of soils, wells and groundwater. Coastal forests were also damaged, in particular near the epicenter on the west coast of Aceh.

This unprecedented emergency was met with an equally unprecedented response from the International Community and people across the globe. Commitments and contributions were estimated at US$15 billion in total, with donations from private citizens and foundations forming the overwhelming majority. Such massive generosity created strong expectations in terms of accountability, and a variety of evaluation exercises were conducted by all partners, some jointly like the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (TEC) composed of over 50 agencies, including FAO, which worked together to promote sector-wide evaluations of tsunami-related programmes.[1]

2. Objectives and methodology of the RTE

The RTE was designed to (see Terms of Reference in Annex 1):

1. Provide immediate feedback and guidance to FAO management on strategic and operational achievements (what works well) and constraints (what doesn’t work well) in order to improve impact, timeliness, coverage, appropriateness, sequencing and consistency of operations;

2. Provide accountability to the affected populations, Governments, donors and other stakeholders on the use of resources in order to reinforce participation, transparency, and communication;

3. Identify gaps or unintended outcomes, with a view to improving the FAO strategy and programme’s approach, orientation, coherence and coordination; and

4. Draw lessons on FAO’s capacity to respond timely and adequately to sudden natural disasters and to support livelihood recovery and development efforts in the agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors.

Based on a short desk study of the FAO tsunami portfolio, the Evaluation Service selected a sample of three countries (Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) where most of the tsunami assistance was being provided, and arranged to send to these countries three successive missions, staged at the beginning, middle and end of the response. A fourth country, the Maldives, was added during the third and last evaluation mission upon request from the Emergency Operations and Rehabilitation Division (TCE). The RTE involved desk studies, field surveys and three evaluation missions over the course of 2005 and 2006:

· The first mission (May 2005) focussed on operational procedures and capacity, damage assessments and programme planning. It was composed of Bernd Bultemeier (Evaluation Officer), Rudolf Hermes (Fisheries Expert), Francois Grunewald (Evaluation Specialist) and was accompanied by Solveig Kolberg (Gender Expert) from the Sri Lanka ERCU.

· The second mission (November 2005) focussed on beneficiary selection, beneficiary satisfaction, preliminary indications of impact, and the use of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) in the tsunami response. It was composed of Olivier Cossée (Evaluation Officer), Rudolf Hermes (Fisheries Expert), and Salem Mezhoud (Sociologist).

· The third mission (June - July 2006) coincided with the end of the period covered by the UN Indian Ocean Tsunami Flash Appeal, and reviewed beneficiary selection and satisfaction in more depth, the impact of the response on communities and institutions, prospects for a transition to longer-term reconstruction and development activities, and the role played by FAO in sectoral coordination. It was composed of Olivier Cossée (Evaluation Officer), James Muir (Fisheries and Natural Resource Management Expert) and Andrée Black-Michaud (Sociologist),

The list of issues was progressively enriched through consultations with programme managers, consistently with the principle that the focus of an RTE should be flexibly adapted to emerging issues and the demand for information emanating from programme stakeholders (emergent evaluation design).

In addition to conducting their own document reviews and interviews with a wide array of stakeholders, these missions trained and supervised national consultants and surveyors undertaking Beneficiary Assessments on their own, which combined individual interviews and focus groups discussions with beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries to draw lessons on the adequacy and impact of the FAO response in each country as seen by the affected communities. These Beneficiary Assessments were coordinated by three national consultants who also participated in the evaluation missions: Nimal Ranaweera (Economist) from Sri Lanka, Kanjapat Korsieporn (Economist) from Thailand and Aceng Hidayat (Anthropologist) from Indonesia. Finally, a desk review was undertaken in Rome from March to June 2006 by Luisa Belli (Consultant) to analyse in greater detail the operational bottlenecks identified during the first and second RTE missions.

The RTE faced many challenges, chief among which stood the sheer size of the work to be evaluated. The four countries in the sample, together with headquarters and regional operations reviewed, accounted for US$60 million or 78% of the whole FAO tsunami response (90% of all resources available during the period reviewed, i.e. up to June 2006). The documentation reviewed was enormous. In each country, the evaluation teams attempted to review in various degrees of detail all the operations, and visited project sites for a wide variety of sectors and activity types, splitting into sub-teams when necessary. However, the teams lacked specialized expertise in some of the technical areas concerned, such as forestry or animal husbandry, and it was not always possible to retain the same consultants for the three missions spread over one-and-a-half years.

Part II - Overview of the FAO Tsunami Response

1. Chronology

On the morning of Sunday, 26 December 2004, many FAO staff were away on Christmas and New Year vacations. At HQ, staff on duty immediately called back colleagues and liaised with OCHA. A rush against time started to prepare an FAO input for the UN Indian Ocean Tsunami Flash Appeal. The consolidated proposal including the cost for relief and rehabilitation interventions was to be ready by 6 January 2005, as requested by the Inter Agency Standing Committee on Emergency response (IASC). From this point on, a very complex and ambitious programme progressively emerged from the efforts of programme planners and implementers and thanks to generous donors’ support.

The following sections of this report review this programme from a geographic standpoint (overview of the response in each country), proceed with a review of the different operational processes that shaped the response (needs assessment, resource mobilization, coordination, beneficiary selection, etc.), attempt to analyse its impact, and seek to extract lessons and recommendations for future FAO disaster responses. It may therefore be useful at this juncture to briefly describe how the FAO tsunami response unfolded over time.

The RTE identified six phases in the FAO’s tsunami response:

· Phase 1: (26 December 2004 – 6 January 2005) While preparing the United Nations Flash Appeal for the Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami, FAO mobilized its own TCP resources to conduct initial needs assessments in Indonesia, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, and appealed for US$29 million in the Flash Appeal.

· Phase 2: (January to April 2005) Activities focused on more detailed needs assessments, securing funding, preparing project documents, setting up Emergency and Rehabilitation Coordination Units (ERCUs), and initial delivery of assistance in Sri Lanka and Thailand.

· Phase 3 (May-June 2005) was marked by the Mid-Term Review of the Flash Appeal, which saw a sharp increase in FAO’s appeal to US$103 million, reflecting mainly a longer period of implementation[2] and additional needs emerging from further needs assessments.

· Phase 4 (July 2005 – June 2006) ended with the Flash Appeal. The bulk of the FAO tsunami response was implemented during this phase and most activities were fully or almost completed by June 2006, although there were significant exceptions in Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

· Phase 5 (July 2006 - early 2007) was a wrapping-up and consolidation phase for the FAO emergency and early rehabilitation response, and the start of the longer-term reconstruction and development programme. Most emergency projects should be completed by end of 2006 or mid 2007, though additional extensions in the case of Indonesia and Sri Lanka cannot be ruled out.

· Phase 6 from 2007 to 2009 or 2010 can be expected to see the implementation of a follow-up reconstruction and development programme. A small number of medium- or long-term projects have already started (e.g. GCP/INS/076/GER ending in November 2008 or GCP/INT/984/MUL ending in December 2007) or should start shortly (notably an ARC-funded project in Indonesia). In Sri Lanka however, the trend appears to be towards a transition to a new emergency related to the re-escalating conflict in the north of the country.

Obviously these phases are not totally homogenous and overlap somewhat with one another. Phase 4 in particular included a variety of activities of different natures, evolving from projects planned during the previous phase and merely concerned with the distribution of simple inputs, to projects comprising a more balanced mix of input distributions, coordination efforts, technical support and training during the later part of 2005 and 2006.

2. Financial resources

Through the UN Flash Appeal, FAO requested US$ 26.5 million for six countries – Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Seychelles, Somalia, and Sri Lanka – and for US$ 2.5 million for regional activities in partnership with UNDP and UNEP. This figure was raised to US$ 103 million during the Mid-Term Review of the Appeal. Donor response was very positive, the most generous ever received until then.[3] Overall, FAO had raised US$ 77 million as of February 2007 (Table 1), i.e. 75% of its requirements under the Mid-Term Review of the Flash Appeal. New projects continue to be funded, particularly in Indonesia, so the total figure is still slowly increasing.

FAO itself provided about US$ 1.5 million from its Technical Cooperation Programme. Four TCP projects were prepared and approved one week after the tsunami, for the Maldives, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, allowing for the rapid establishment of programmes and offices in these countries. Contributions were also received from a number of non-traditional donors such as Greece, China, Trinidad and Tobago, The Lao People's Democratic Republic, the Italian Protezione Civile, the American Red Cross, WFP, and even from private sector companies (CONAD supermarkets in Italy, the Standard Bank of South Africa) or NGOs (American Red Cross).

This level of funding may seem quite significant by FAO standards, but it represented only a tiny fraction of the overall resources availed to post-tsunami emergency and reconstruction assistance worldwide. FAO received 5.5% of the funds channelled through the UN Flash Appeal and only 0.5% of total overall post-tsunami funding, estimated by the TEC at US$15 billion.[4]

As of August 2006, half of all expenditures concerned procurement of equipment and inputs (Figure 1). Overall, the fisheries sector received two-third of the funds mobilized for the tsunami response (Figure 2), adequately so.

Indonesia received the largest share of resources, followed by Sri Lanka (Table 2). Like the breakdown by sectors, this resource allocation pattern appears by-and-large appropriate.

Figure 3 above displays the financial delivery of various countries during the response, and illustrates the fact that Thailand and Sri Lanka were the countries where the first FAO activities were implemented, with significant hard commitments as early as March 2005. Up to mid-2005, most commitments and expenditures concerned global functions, including ERCUs funded through the FAO Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities (SFERA, see p.18) and the three most affected countries: Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Expenditures in the less affected Maldives, Myanmar, Seychelles and Somalia only picked up in the second half of 2005.

As of August 2006, the overall rate of financial delivery including hard commitments was 65%, a reasonable performance given the size and complexity of the portfolio. At the current rate of expenditures (about US$2.5 million per month) and assuming donors are agreeable to project extensions, the FAO tsunami response will come to a close toward mid-2007. Subsequent sections of the report explore at length the factors that tended to slow down delivery during the response.

3. Tsunami response in sample countries

Indonesia

FAO mobilized some US$29 million for Indonesia, the highest FAO budget of all countries affected by the tsunami. This budget was more evenly spread between sectors than in Sri Lanka, with some US$11 million devoted to agriculture, US$14 million to capture fisheries and aquaculture, and the rest allocated to cross-sectoral activities.[5] The programme, implemented in partnership with NGOs and local governments, involved the following activities:

· In the fisheries sector, FAO designed and contracted the construction of 97 wooden boats of various improved traditional designs[6] in six boatyards around the province, distributed engines and fishing gear for 2,000 fishermen through NGOs distributing boats, donated fish processing equipment (racks, pans, cookers, etc.) to some 400 beneficiaries, constructed two fish markets in Banda Aceh, distributed 200 insulated boxes to fishers, fish traders and fish processors around Banda Aceh and Simeulue, rehabilitated 650 ha of fish ponds in Aceh Besar, Pidie and Bireuen, and distributed fish farming inputs such as seed, feed, lime, pumps, and fertilizer to 1,500 fish farmers.

· In the agriculture sector, distributions of various inputs (rice, maize, groundnut, soybean and vegetable seeds, fertiliser, hand tractors, threshers, reapers, water pumps, handtools and various fruit trees) to approximately 70,000 farmers from June-August 2005 (mainly in the east coast) to end of 2006 (most distributions in 2006 took place on the west coast, which was largely inaccessible in 2005); clearing of 380 ha of paddy fields through cash-for-work; and distribution of 500 buffaloes and cattle, and 1,000 goats to communities having lost their livestock in the tsunami.

· In the forestry sector, FAO assessed timber needs and sources, and demonstrated a participatory approach for the restoration of mangroves and coastal forests.

FAO also contributed to damage and need assessments by the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF) and the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), ADB and the World Bank, drafted two sector reconstruction strategies in agriculture and fisheries, provided technical assistance through coordination meetings and workshops in agriculture and fisheries, undertook a survey of the number of constructed boats to lobby for a reduction of the number of boats constructed by NGOs’ and other partners, advocated for raising boat building standards and trained boat builders.

Sectoral coordination was facilitated in partnership with the Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi (BRR, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency for Aceh and Nias). The programme was largely completed at the end of 2006, with some work extending over the years to come, notably through a German-funded technical assistance project set to end in 2008 and funding from the American Red Cross for a three and a half year transitional project.

Initially, the FAO operations in Indonesia suffered from a number of logistical constraints and administrative difficulties (miscommunications between the two Emergency Coordination Units in Jakarta and Banda Aceh, rapid staff turn-over, unfavourable employment conditions for national staff and inadequate financial authority). These issues were solved towards the end of 2005 with the opening of an imprest account and the granting of increased financial authority and flexibility in the hiring of national staff to the office in Banda Aceh. Delivery accelerated significantly in 2006.

Sri Lanka

The ERCU was established in Colombo in January 2005 and an experienced Coordinator arrived in March. During 2005, the ERCU grew into a core group of operational staff and international and national consultants with strong technical expertise. Two regional offices were opened in Trincomalee and Tangalle and headed by international Area Coordinators. The national staff contributed significantly to the response. By February 2006, there were 36 nationals supporting the programme in Colombo (among them seven experienced national consultants, eight administrative and programme assistants, etc.). The ERCU also inherited some 20 national field officers from pre-existing TCEO projects.

It should be mentioned that FAO remained without a Representative in the country for months after the incumbent retired in January 2005 and was not immediately replaced. This may have contributed to an initial difficult relationship with the Government.

FAO teams and Government officers started to jointly assess damage and needs only a few days after the catastrophe.[7] The level of funding secured by FAO for the country ($25 million) was the second highest for an FAO response in all countries affected by the tsunami.[8] Most of the funds were used to support the capture fisheries sector (about 70%). This is justifiable since most of the damage was in the fisheries sector. The programme was implemented largely through governmental institutions but also in partnership with a few NGOs, notably Italian. It delivered the following assistance:

· In the fisheries sector, 2,738 boats and 1,329 outboard engines were repaired through the parastatal Cey‑Nor[9] in a relatively short timeframe (first half of 2005); 712 new outboard engines and 41 new inboard engines were distributed (as of September 2006); some 5,300 fishers benefited from the distribution of some 76,000 fishing nets (end of 2005 to September 2006). The delivery of fishing gear was unfortunately delayed by a protracted procurement process described on page 24. An attempt to repair in-board engines for multi-day boats was largely unsuccessful due to the shortage of spare parts for these 30-year-old engines.

· In the agricultural sector, FAO distributed 68 tonnes of paddy seed, 165 tonnes of fertilizer, 560 packs of vegetable seed and 9,250 hoes during the yala season (February-March 2005), and of 280 tonnes of paddy seed, 1,173 tonnes of fertilizer, 44,000 fruit trees, 3,600 packets of vegetable seeds and 39 tonnes of seed for other field crops for the maha season (October-November 2005). Various other materials have been delivered (sprayers, water pumps, rice threshers), as well as livestock (cattle, goats and poultry) to about 2,000 households. Altogether, these distributions reached some 80% of the tsunami affected farmers, i.e. a total of approximately 13,000 families. Three solar refrigerators were delivered to three veterinary offices in the North-East (Mulativu) to store vaccines.

· In the forestry sector, the programme worked with the Department of Forestry to rehabilitate coastal forests and urban trees in some of the most affected areas of the east coast.[10]

Capacity building formed a significant component in Sri Lanka. Nearly all agricultural input beneficiaries were trained in simple plant and animal production techniques and nutrition. Conductivity meters and pH metres were donated to the Government and salinity surveillance contracts awarded to the North-East Provincial Department of Agriculture and to the Horticultural Research and Development Institute (HORDI), and thirty-six Agriculture Instructors were exposed to soil and water sampling methodologies. The Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFAR) received assistance to design and enforce safety-at-sea regulations.

FAO’s support to sectoral coordination in Sri Lanka was noteworthy. Monthly coordination meetings with wide participation of donors and NGOs started as early as January 2005. The meetings started to be co-chaired by the Government and FAO in March 2005. They discussed a rich variety of topics over the evaluated period, notably the risk of creating excessive fishing capacity, documented through regular surveys of NGOs and other partners’ asset donations in the fisheries sector.[11]

Two strategies for post-tsunami reconstruction of the fisheries and agriculture sectors were drafted in March 2005, presented to the fisheries and agriculture coordination meeting and discussed in national workshops. The fisheries strategy was published in April 2006 and the agriculture strategy was being finalized during the third RTE mission. A master plan for fish landing site rehabilitation was also prepared by FAO and the Government and presented in sectoral coordination meetings. Iceland and the Netherlands consequently funded the rehabilitation of several landing sites based on this master plan.

Thailand

The FAO Emergency Operations and Rehabilitation Division (TCE)’s role in backstopping the tsunami programme in Thailand was rather limited, as the Thai Affairs Section of the FAO Regional Office for Asia Pacific (RAP) almost entirely managed the FAO response. Technical experts from the regional representation carried out needs assessments. Project documentation and operational processes were all drafted and approved locally, making good use of the authority level of the ADG-RAP for procurements, contracts and LoAs^{^[12]}. The programme benefited from a small cadre of national consultants with very good knowledge of local conditions, institutions and capacities.

In view of the respective needs of other, more severely affected countries and of the Royal Government of Thailand (RGT) own financial assistance to affected farmers and fisher folks, FAO allocated a comparatively small amount of financial resources to its tsunami response programme in Thailand, with some US$2 million approved, of which two-third were for the fisheries sector and one third for agriculture.

FAO/RAP worked with the Government right from January 2005, when conducting damage and needs assessments, then moved on to implement initial asset replacement projects, and gradually shifted to longer-term rehabilitation and developmental initiatives over the course of 2005 and 2006. This close relationship with the Government was a constant throughout the response. Partnerships with NGOs and with research and academic centers developed progressively during 2005 and 2006. All projects were completed by 30 June 2006 and the financial delivery is close to 100%. The programme delivered the following:

· In the fisheries sector, 800 fish cage units, 1,128 fish cage nets, 180,000 fish fingerlings (sea bass and grouper species), 18,000 fish, crab and squid traps, 3,320 shrimp gill nets and 408 timber pieces for boat repair, as well as 430 boat engines (on a credit basis) were distributed to an estimated 2,230 affected individuals.

· In the agriculture sector, the programme benefited some 1,300 farmers through the distribution of 356 kg of rice and watermelon seeds, 15,000 fruit seedlings, 46 tons of chemical fertilizer, 247 tons of gypsum and 1,052 tons of organic fertilizer (salinity management). Thirty net houses and eighty hydroponic systems were also distributed to promote livelihoods diversification. Finally, 500 livestock owners received 42 tons of feed concentrate, 135 tons of hay and 1,500 mineral blocks to feed their livestock while pastures were recovering from seawater intrusion.

Towards the end of 2005 and in 2006, FAO focussed on providing policy advice and further assessments. A fishing capacity survey was carried out to provide policy recommendations and management strategies for the sustainable use of fishery resources. Detailed damage assessment for mangrove and coastal forests were also undertaken. Training courses were provided to programme beneficiaries in aquaculture, hydroponic vegetable production. Two Mangrove Research Stations in Phuket and Phang Nga were supported with GIS equipment and salinity meters and conductivity testers were provided to the Department of Agriculture Extension (DoAE) and to the Land Development Department (LDD). A salinity damage assessment was also performed and made recommendations for the rehabilitation and development of the agriculture sector. The programme also carried out public awareness promotion activities on ecological and economic functions of coastal forests, and a long-term rehabilitation framework and an action plan for the rehabilitation of tsunami-affected coastal forests were prepared and validated in a national workshop.

Coordination efforts came later than in other countries. A Post-Tsunami Rehabilitation Coordination Unit was created within the Department of Fisheries (DOF) in October 2005 and fully established as an independent unit under DOF in April 2006 to monitor fisheries asset replacement programmes by all agencies and NGOs and avoid the creation of excess capacity; a national coordination meeting in the fisheries sector was held in March 2006; two provincial workshops met in Ranong and Phang Nga in June 2006.

The Maldives

Prior to the tsunami, FAO representation in the Maldives was covered from Sri Lanka. In February 2005, TCE set up an Emergency and Rehabilitation Coordination Unit (ERCU) in Malé to manage the tsunami response. The office was headed by an Officer in Charge and, since July 2005, by an outposted TCE Operation Officer acting as Emergency Coordinator. The office also hired five national assistants and logisticians.

The geography of the Maldives presents a particularly challenging context for an emergency operation, with a dispersed location of tsunami-affected communities as the main feature. A third of the archipelago’s 199 inhabited islands house less than 500 people.

Right at the onset of the tsunami response in January 2005, FAO took the lead in damage and needs assessments in the fisheries and agriculture sectors, carried out in partnership with the Government, the World Bank, IFAD and the ADB.

The overall level of funding that FAO was subsequently able to commit to the Maldives was relatively modest and totalled about US$4.2 million: $2 million for fisheries and $2.2 million for agriculture.[13] The primary aim of the FAO response has been the restoration of the means of fisheries-, agricultural- and forestry-based livelihoods, through the replacement of fishing vessels and gear, and the provision of seeds, seedlings, fertilisers and implements for agriculture and forestry:

· In the fisheries sector, it was decided in consultation with the Government to support the introduction of the Fiber-Reinforced Plastic (FRP) technology with the construction and distribution of 89 small boats to replace lost bokkuraas (small boats for transport and reef fishing). The programme also assisted the Ministry of Fisheries, Agriculture and Marine Resources (MFAMR) in designing a new 85-foot FRP vessel built by MFAMR with JICS funding, and distributed fishing gear to 378 large vessel owners who had repaired their boats at their own cost. Thirteen boat engines were repaired through an agreement with JICS.

· The agriculture programme targeted some 4,500 households in 51 islands. Each agricultural kit contained 65 gm of assorted vegetable seeds, 100 kg of compost, 100 kg of cow dung, 30 kg of chemical fertilizer, various hand tools, sweet potato cuttings and a selection of fruit tree and chili seedlings. Distribution in the South was delayed by the late arrival of compost and the loss of a significant number of sweet potato cuttings and fruit trees during transport in February 2006.

· In the forestry sector, the programme assessed the forestry damage and status of forestry resources and developed a programme focusing on the restoration of damaged coastal forests and agro-forestry in six islands in the North.

Specific elements of training and planning support were also provided in FRP construction and repair, compost making, salinity measurement, and nursery techniques. Assistance in policy advice included a fisheries sector review developed in cooperation with the World Bank, technical assistance to establish a plant quarantine system, and the drafting of an agriculture master plan.

4. The role of the Regional Office

Given the tsunami’s regional impact, the FAO Regional Office for Asia Pacific (RAP) had a significant role to play at the strategic level, over and beyond the support it provided to the implementation of the Thailand programme. RAP helped to develop a number of guidelines (e.g. on aquaculture and saline soil reclamation) and provided technical guidance to governments and FAO emergency programme counterparts, initially through the mobilization of RAP staff but later through development of TORs for consultants, review of project proposals and the provision of technical clearance.

For agriculture, the responsibility for technical clearance of tsunami projects, reports, recruitments and procurements was decentralized from headquarters to RAP. In the forestry sector, a technical officer was decentralized to Bangkok to manage the response (mainly composed of the Finnish regional project OSRO/GLO/502/FIN) from within the region. In contrast, the Fisheries Department did not devolve its technical clearance function to RAP because RAP lacked sufficient technical capacity in fisheries industries (fishing vessels and gear).[14]

A number of regional or global projects have also been formulated and implemented from Bangkok. In the fisheries sector, RAP supported programme and strategy development in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India. It was a founding partner of the CONSRN consortium[15] which held 13 regular meetings, two regional workshops and one programme planning workshop since its initiation. A project funded by the Peoples' Democratic Republic of Lao (OSRO/RAS/504/LAO) and managed by RAP funded participatory fishery resource assessments in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The main project in the forestry sector (OSRO/GLO/502/FIN) was also managed at the regional level.[16] Another project, intended to facilitate information management and coordination in agriculture (OSRO/RAS/503/CHA), funded recovery surveys, trainings and workshops in Indonesia, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Finally, a longer-term regional project was recently approved, with a view to pilot participatory, community-based rehabilitation and planning approaches in the countries affected by the tsunami (GCP/RAS/218/JPN).

Although a strong argument can be made for programmes and approaches to be decided at the national level, the RTE concluded that the Regional Office demonstrated added value in the following areas:

Interactions with regional bodies;
Focal point for strategic sectoral approaches;
Facilitation of experience sharing and lessons learning among affected countries through the organization of regional meetings;
Transboundary issues concerning, in this case, fisheries;
Technical resources outposted to the regional level were potentially more effective than in headquarters, because more accessible; and
Resource mobilization when some important donors were within the region (e.g. Japan).

5. Support from headquarters

The degree of involvement and mobilization of headquarters in decision making varied from one phase to the next. During the first and second phases, i.e. from January to April 2005, headquarters were clearly highly mobilized to draft the FAO contribution to the Flash Appeal, prepare project documents and mobilize funds, organize needs assessments, and set up the FAO Tsunami Website (Box 1 overleaf).

An illustration of this strong mobilization of headquarters at the outset of the response is provided by the frequency of coordination meetings held at headquarters. These were of three types:

The ADG meetings on the FAO response to the tsunami in Asia, chaired by the Deputy DG with attendance from all ADGs, and relevant staff from all departments, and a mandate in decision making at the strategic level;
The Tsunami Technical Committee meetings, also known as Tsunami Task Force meetings, with a more technical mandate in supporting programme design and implementation;
The videoconferences between the Tsunami Technical Committee and FAO field offices (RAP, Sri Lanka and Indonesia), destined to coordinate efforts at headquarters with the field level.

All together, there were 12 formal coordination meetings held at headquarters in January 2005, 11 in February, 7 in March, 4 in April, and about one per month thereafter. A meeting fatigue developed over time. Some participants opined that smaller, more focussed and less formal meetings constituted more efficient decision-making forums.

Perhaps an illustration of this trend toward smaller coordination groups is the creation by the Fisheries Department in January 2006 of its own Coordination and Technical Support Unit for Tsunami Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (CTSU) to facilitate the transition from the emergency programme to longer-term development activities in the fisheries sector. In Sri Lanka, the CTSU helped develop eleven priority project proposals addressing issues such as safety at sea, fish quality improvement or reducing post harvest losses, and assisted the MFAR in presenting these proposals to potential donors. The CTSU also provided assistance in the development of the American Red Cross proposal for Indonesia and of a comprehensive project to be funded by the World Bank to develop a management framework for fisheries in India (Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry).

A review of the minutes of the ADG meetings, the Tsunami Technical Committee meetings and the videoconferences between FAO headquarters and field offices indicated that most of the issues that would later evolve into critical problems and that are analysed in the present report were identified very early on, such as the challenges posed by insufficient coordination of a huge crowd of actors, the desired balance between physical inputs and technical support in FAO’s assistance, or the administrative challenges posed by such a large and complex FAO intervention. What is striking, however, is that while these fundamental issues were raised very early on, they were seldom analysed in sufficient detail to allow for their resolution.

6. Collaboration between FAO units

The RTE identified a “disconnect” (i.e. a need for more communication, collaboration and sometimes team spirit) between headquarters and field offices and between the various headquarters units involved in the tsunami response. The FAO Fisheries Department had never been involved in an emergency response of this dimension before and had originally little working relationship with TCE. Some progress was made as rapport developed across divisional lines. This “institutional disconnect” applied to all phases of the response, though it bore particular relevance during the initial programme planning phase and toward the end of the response during the transition from an emergency and early rehabilitation operation to a longer term reconstruction and development programme. It was compounded by the following factors:

The absence of an established mechanism in FAO to take policy and strategic decisions for cross-departmental programmes. The PAIA REHAB (now programme entity 4DS02) is geared towards lessons learning and normative activities rather than at operational issues. The Emergency Coordination Group (ECG) has not been used as a forum to coordinate individual responses. This role was devolved to the ADG tsunami group, which as explained above met frequently at the onset of the response and did discuss programme-wide strategies and identify the need for a smooth transition from emergency to development as early as February 2005. However, neither the ADG group nor any other body seem to have developed an overall programme strategy with jointly agreed goals.
Financial disincentives, particularly during the transition from rehabilitation to reconstruction and development: TCEO is almost entirely funded out of extra-budgetary projects, which makes it unlikely to transfer to other FAO units the donors’ resources and contacts it depends on. Correspondingly, FAORs are not formally assessed against the quantity and quality of their delivery in emergencies, which is unfair to those FAORs who do contribute to emergency programmes and may help explain why some others do not.
An unclear conceptual framework to define terms such as “emergency”, “rehabilitation” or “reconstruction” as they apply to FAO, as well as the respective roles of TCE and Technical Departments in each of these functions.

Part III – Programme Design and Management

1. Damage and needs assessments

The first two weeks after the tsunami were characterized by rapid fact finding missions that produced mostly “guesstimates” and assessed damage and needs based on limited field visits and a number of assumptions and secondary sources, followed by the second phase of more structured assessments combining a review of secondary data with the collection of primary data during more extensive field visits, direct observation and key informants interviews.[17]

The RTE confirmed that the technical expertise brought to bear by the Organization during early assessments was widely appreciated: FAO moved in quickly to assist governments in undertaking initial assessments. In Thailand and the Maldives, the damage and needs assessments organized jointly by FAO and the Government very early after the tsunami helped shape the Government response.

At headquarters, a tsunami atlas and maps were prepared quickly by SDRN in cooperation with other partners, and the ongoing technical surveys and fine-tuned assessments provided valuable inputs to post-tsunami plans and strategy development of International Financial Institutions (IFIs). The regional workshops organized by RAP provided some basic principles for more holistic approaches, although these were seldom translated into practice.

The second phase of assessment occurred from the end of January to April 2005. A large number of missions were fielded, and although much effort was spent, results were sometimes far from optimal. One of the reasons behind this weakness is the mechanism through which FAO carried out this assessment work:

i) The absence of a holistic approach, with most of the assessment work done following sector and sub-sector divisions. The majority of assessment reports by FAO were not formal assessment reports but were back-to-office reports, a type of document typically used by a single staff or a few colleagues for the purpose of their own Division’s information needs.

ii) The position of TCE in the overall coordination of diagnostic and assessment work was challenged by technical units. A degree of institutional disconnect was already apparent during the second batch of needs assessments. Work coordinated by TCE (emergency procurement of relief items, fielding of missions, budgetary planning, etc.) was initially not well coordinated with the work of technical units, concentrated on needs assessments and strategic planning.

iii) Some of the teams sent out for the assessment work were not familiar with programme design and implementation. Key elements for programme design (e.g. the status and capacities of national and local institutions) were often missing in needs assessment reports.

iv) Many assessment reports were cleared or released late by technical divisions and some assessment reports were not well communicated and disseminated.

v) Assessments rapidly became outdated. The needs and the assistance on offer were evolving fast.

A truly multi-disciplinary and coherent approach would have suited the situation in Sri Lanka and Indonesia better – as it was, the FAO approach was fragmented, with people working side by side but not together. There is also a need to better relate damage and needs assessment to ecological assessments and livelihoods issues. Due to this narrowly sectoral and technical focus, a number of key areas for understanding livelihoods and how they were affected by the tsunami were not or insufficiently covered:

i) the assessments tended to focus on the productive function of farmers and fishers, with little attention paid to the damage inflicted to the rest of the market chains, e.g. fish processing industries, marketing channels, input providers – this may have contributed to the strong bias in the initial response towards supporting food production, at the expense of other affected segments of the market chains;

ii) linked to the above, gender and gender roles in food production / processing / marketing were insufficiently analysed, which may be the root cause for gender not being much factored in the response at least initially;

iii) with the damage assessments focussing on damaged infrastructures, there was a lack of attention paid to local capacities and assets which were not or only marginally affected by the tsunami: seed cooperatives, hatcheries, social capital that could be used and built upon in the response, and the experience and expertise available from FAO long-term projects (notably SPFS)[18]; and

iv) forestry and costal management, leading to FAO losing visibility in these areas to other actors such as UNEP or NGOs.

In all assessments, local officials in district and sub-district offices and village heads constituted the main source of primary data, appropriately so as communities did not have the time and inclination to do PRAs or group interviews, at least initially. However, there could have been a more systematic and structured attempt at collecting needs and recommendations from producer organisations and fishing societies.

Given the reliance on secondary data, the lack of pre-tsunami data in some countries proved a major impediment. In the Maldives, agriculture was long considered a low-priority sector and very little data had been collected prior to the tsunami. In Indonesia, the long-standing conflict situation in Aceh led to some sectors being under-studied by the Government, notably aquaculture. In none of the countries visited by the RTE was the fishing boat registration system comprehensive enough to form a strong basis for the assessment of damage and individual entitlements in capture fisheries.

Due to these limitations and to the need to report on needs assessments as quickly as possible, initial assessments are often and understandably imperfect. They also tend to become quickly outdated in a very dynamic environment where needs and assistance on offer are evolving rapidly. The particular characteristics of the tsunami, with massive displacement of populations, also contributed to problems in identifying beneficiaries and their needs. These observations call for regular assessments of needs and recovery conducted all through the recovery period, rather than a one-off initial assessment. FAO is in an excellent position to provide this sort of recovery monitoring services in areas of its mandate, and in fact it did conduct regular needs and recovery assessments in the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka, and to a lesser extent in Thailand and Indonesia. These periodic surveys tracking how many boats and fishing gear were being distributed and recovered by all actors combined were much appreciated by governments, donors and NGOs alike, and helped shape the FAO response as well.

2. Project design

As explained above, most early project documents were derived very rapidly from generic versions of earlier emergency project documents, rather than on the basis of needs assessments, still ongoing at that time. The proposals for the Flash Appeal had to be submitted to OCHA on 6 January 2005, before any serious assessment could be completed. As it turned out, the cost estimates for the FAO proposal to the Flash Appeal had to be substantially increased during the mid-term review of the Appeal, partly because needs had been underestimated and also to reflect the extension of the Appeal implementation period from six to twelve months.

In order to save time, some projects were also written based on limited feedback from field offices and with insufficient involvement of the national governments, which led in some cases to delays in their approval and implementation at the national level. However, project design during subsequent phases became more context-specific. These subsequent project documents were more diversified and more strategic than in past FAO emergency operations. While most early projects were focused chiefly on the delivery of “hardware”, i.e. relief inputs, projects designed later on considered exit strategies for emergency assistance and the transition to development. Overall a gradation towards a greater emphasis on “software” (capacity building, technical assistance) activities was noticeable over 2005 and 2006. However, the initial over-emphasis on input-delivery clearly compromised the time technical staff could have devoted to coordination, technical assistance, quality control and monitoring.

Though the desirability of participatory processes was emphasised from early commentaries onwards, their use in initial stages was negligible. Only later, in projects such as OSRO/SRL/505/ITA was this made more explicit in project design. The approach proved difficult to implement properly given the limited timescale of two years. PRA documents reviewed by the mission were of high quality, though apparently extractive in nature. More generally, there are perhaps misunderstandings about using SLA just as an analytical tool, identifying need and weaknesses, rather than considering it as a potentially empowering tool. The importance of the role of livelihoods approaches – over and beyond PRA – in defining current and future needs and in developing social capital to help manage natural resources has been under-recognised so far.

Another issue has been the absence of a formal programme approach, apart from the Flash Appeal itself, which could be construed as a cursory programme document. Projects tended to be developed as scattered, isolated initiatives, usually limited to one country and one sector or sub-sector with little reference to programme-wide objectives, strategies and priorities. This lack of an overall programme approach may explain some of the discrepancies between the strategies followed by the respective country programmes, e.g. in the ways and extent to which FAO promoted sectoral coordination in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia.

3. Earmarking resources and budgeting

In general terms, donors’ generosity in support of the FAO tsunami response was matched by a willingness to apply greater flexibility in the way the use of their resource would be planned and budgeted. Japan, Norway and OCHA selected some Flash Appeal profiles for allocating their funds and did not require the lengthy process of approving a detailed project document and budget.[19] Some donors gave un-earmarked or programmatic funds to the recently-created Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities (SFERA, see below) for the tsunami needs assessments and for the set up and support of Emergency and Rehabilitation Coordination Units (Germany, Norway, United Kingdom, Finland and Canada). Others did not fund SFERA but did nevertheless have a rather flexible budgeting approach which enabled the allocation of funds to broad sectors or geographical areas that were not covered by other donors. In the case of Finland, funds were used to finance a single regional forestry project active in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Maldives.

However, many donors still expressed geographical and sector preferences or restrictions which typically required the drafting, approval and management of several projects per donor.

Some donors imposed particular conditions concerning the type of support provided:

Italy and Japan insisted that some of their funds be used in projects implemented in collaboration with Italian / Japanese NGOs.[20]
ECHO and Belgium required that a minimum of, respectively, 60% and 70% of the budget be spent on equipment and inputs to be delivered to beneficiaries, thus restricting the part of the budget devoted to technical assistance and staff.

· The People’s Republic of China provided most of its support in kind, in the form of fishing gear and boat engines made in China. FAO found ways to use the Chinese fishing gear by donating them to Maldivian fishermen in compensation for expenses incurred in boat repair, but the RTE concluded that this utilisation of the Chinese in-kind donation was not cost-effective. The Chinese boat engines arrived so late in Indonesia that it was difficult to identify fishers genuinely needing them.

One condition imposed by many donors and by OCHA[21] regarded the duration of project implementation. Past evaluations of FAO emergency and early rehabilitation programmes[22] have highlighted the issue of time constraints linked to donors’ procedures. It was found that performance tended to be negatively affected by short-term donor horizons for funding, especially through the Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP). This has a negative impact on staff management, on longer-term planning and connectedness between emergency and longer-term interventions, and on technical work, since CAP timeframes are rather inflexible and do not necessarily match agricultural seasons.

It should be stressed that funding instruments such as the CAP and humanitarian donors such as ECHO were historically set up to fund simple and short-term humanitarian assistance typically not extending beyond six months. They are unfit to the medium-term horizon entailed by FAO’s programmes, which aim at the rehabilitation of livelihoods, infrastructures and capacities. This tension was evident in the case of the tsunami, as the sheer extent of the damage, the size of the financial resource mobilized and a limited absorption capacity all contributed to long implementation periods. For instance, the Indonesian Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi (Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency for Aceh and Nias - BRR) estimated that the reconstruction of the most affected west coast of Aceh will take no less than four years.

In some cases, the late approval of the project documents by the donor or, more frequently, by the recipient government caused delays in project implementation. In Sri Lanka, a situation developed where the Government refused to sign project documents for months due to a disagreement over the share of the budgets devoted to physical inputs, seen as insufficient.

In general terms however, this sort of delay induced by funding and project preparation, a frequent occurrence in previous FAO emergency programmes, was largely avoided during the tsunami response thanks to the use of a new fund set up by FAO to expedite emergency funding: the Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities (SFERA). Established in 2004, the fund was used for the first time during the tsunami response. It was authorized to provide for the following, often under-funded activities:

Participation in inter-agency needs assessment and coordination activities;
Establishment of Emergency and Rehabilitation Coordination Units (ERCUs);
Preparation of programme frameworks and projects;
Advance funding for input procurement once a donor’s commitment is secured;

GIEWS crop and food supply assessment missions; and
Early involvement in market research for procurement purposes.[23]

Overall, SFERA received some US$10 million for the purpose of the tsunami response (Table 3). Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom agreed to use SFERA to fund needs assessments and the establishment of Emergency Coordination Units, for a total of US$4.1 million. Contributions from Finland, Norway and Canada were used to support technical advice in forestry and agriculture to the tune of US$ 6.5 millions. In addition, nearly US$5 million were advanced from SFERA to fund procurement activities under nine projects prior to the receipt of funds, in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand (not shown in Table 4 because refunded).

The Fund played a pivotal role in shaping FAO’s initial emergency response to the tsunami disaster and contributed to the continuous availability of funding, which in the majority of cases was not perceived as a constraint by programme managers. It enabled a relatively rapid deployment of expertise and early start of project implementation.

Up until May 2006, 96% of the advances were replenished. Replenishment occurred on average three weeks after the SFERA advance, though it took up to five months when the transfer of funds from the donor was particularly delayed.

However, the Fund’s accounting processes remain complex, manual and ad hoc, processes. The processes to account for advances and their reimbursement are time-consuming and entirely based on hard copy journals and spreadsheets. Besides, SFERA is used to support a wide range of emergency programmes (tsunami, avian flu, etc.). However, the particular disaster to which a particular project budget is earmarked is currently not coded in the accounting system.

As a result, TCE has to rely on manually-maintained spreadsheets to account for the use of SFERA funds. One of the reasons for this is that the way TCE uses the Fund has evolved over and beyond its original scope to serve as a means of channelling donor contributions that do not require detailed project proposals and budgets in advance. The Fund’s operational model and its accounting and reporting requirements would first need to be finalized before the accounting system can be automated.

4. Monitoring of the response

Overall and in spite of exceptions mentioned below, the FAO tsunami response was not sufficiently monitored, and this weakness contributed to a number of problems not being picked up soon enough.

In Sri Lanka, the second RTE mission (November 2005) identified a need to monitor the FAO tsunami response more closely than was the case until then, not only technically but also in terms of beneficiary satisfaction. This was particularly important since the partner in charge of boat repairs (Cey-Nor) was awarded the work without a competitive process and tended to operate in a non-transparent manner.

In Indonesia, the programme set up formal monitoring processes in the agriculture sector only. The general principle was to request FAO implementing partners (NGOs and more recently decentralize governments) to produce two progress reports for each operation: one post-distribution report describing the beneficiary selection and distribution process, and one final report summarizing the results of post distribution surveys of beneficiary satisfaction and outcomes. The RTE reviewed a cross section of such reports and found them of generally good – if uneven – quality, the unevenness reflecting the wide variety of partners.

The beneficiary surveys could have generated more useful findings, had they been entrusted to a group of professional surveyors. Requesting implementation partners to collect such data entails loss of data quality (implementation partners often lack the expertise to collect and analyze such data) as well as a conflict of interest (implementing partners have little interest in reporting low satisfaction rates). However, the agriculture team in Indonesia must be commended for collecting outcome data and for using this data in analyzing problems and sources of dissatisfaction so as to improve their performance. The fisheries team should have done better, e.g. develop a log book on which to record catches and expenses incurred by the beneficiaries of the distributed boats in order to gauge programme outcomes.

In the Maldives, most activities did not require much regular monitoring, a good thing since the capacity for ongoing monitoring at the island level was limited. However, an independent survey of programme beneficiaries could have been useful to identify mismatches between the offer of assistance and the needs of assisted communities.

In Thailand, the programme’s outputs, beneficiaries and outcomes were very closely monitored and amply reported to all partners, not through a structured M&E system but by way of frequent field visits by national and international consultants and good process documentation. Frequent adjustments to the programme implementation approach were introduced following feedback gathered through such monitoring missions.

5. Reporting to donors

The donor representatives met by the RTE missions were generally satisfied with the degree to which they have been kept informed about the progress of the activities they funded. The channels used were however often informal, through meetings and short, ad hoc interim reports. Formal progress or final reports started to be prepared towards May and June 2006, i.e. at the tail-end of the period reviewed by the RTE. Another source of information on the programme was provided by quarterly newsletters produced by the Communication and Reporting Officer in Indonesia. These newsletters, of excellent quality, could have been produced in other countries as well and distributed more widely. In addition, two monitoring missions by the FAO Liaison Office in Japan (LOJA) were fielded in November 2005 in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and acted largely on behalf of the donor.

One time-consuming step in producing project reports was in deciding which part of the input packages delivered by FAO was purchased with funds from which particular project, since funds from various related projects are often pulled together to purchase a particular input package. Such a programme approach to procurement is certainly a good thing, but it creates difficulties when trying to report to donors about what particular items their funds have served to procure. The simplest, easiest and most transparent solution to this problem was to report to donors on a programme basis rather than project by project, explaining that their individual contributions served to fund x % of the total programme. This approach has been adopted in Sri Lanka and in the Maldives. Along the same lines, an overall report for all Japanese-funded projects funded through the Flash Appeal was issued in June 2006.[24] In the past, donors often insisted on detailed, project-by-project reporting but things appear to be changing, as illustrated by widespread donor agreement with the new approach of the FAO Evaluation Service to evaluate programmes like the tsunami response as a whole rather than through individual project evaluations.

Part IV – Operational Capacity and Efficiency

This section of the report reviews the issue of the FAO operational capacity in some detail. The issue has been highlighted in previous evaluations of FAO’s emergency activities, and it emerged once again during the three evaluation missions of the RTE as an important and lasting problem, repeatedly identified by staff, consultants and partners alike as the main weakness in the FAO tsunami response. Rather than contenting itself with general statements about the insufficient FAO’s operational capacities in emergencies, the RTE resorted to analyse carefully a number of case studies based on feedback from the field and a desk study conducted at headquarters, with a view to locate precisely where the main bottlenecks lie in the chain of operational processes and propose specific and practical ways of making progress. This section presents the main conclusions from this analysis, and illustrates them with a few examples drawn from case studies.

1. Human resource management

Deployment of staff during phase 1 and phase 2 of the chronology defined on p.3 was relatively rapid: Emergency Coordinators and other key staff were dispatched to the region by early January. It was during subsequent phases that most problems occurred:

· Mandatory breaks in contract for national and international consultants and short-term staff contribute to a continuous turnover and consume time and resources unnecessarily. Even though waivers are routinely asked and generally granted, the preparation and processing of these waivers take an inordinate amount of time.

· There was not enough logistical or administrative capacity positioned at the field level, and a lack of senior FAO staff presence in the field. Other UN organizations deployed very senior operational and technical staff for long periods of time; instead, FAO tended to resort to hiring technical consultants and backstop them through numerous missions from headquarters, a system that has shown its limits.

· As a result of the above, technical consultants were asked to perform too many tasks: formulate and manage projects, manage project procedures they were not familiar with, facilitate sectoral coordination which in itself requires proper skills and experiences, and of course provide technical assistance to FAO and its partners. Administrative tasks took precedence over technical assistance.

· While an ample number of national consultants were hired to supervise the programme in Sri Lanka and in Thailand, recruitment of national consultants was slower in Indonesia, leaving the international staff under higher pressure than necessary and with limited local contacts. A key factor here was probably the insufficiently attractive conditions offered by FAO.

The time and resources currently spent by TCEO to follow upon personnel matters (up to two-third of Operations Officers’ time by some accounts) are not sustainable in an emergency operation, when efforts should be focused on designing and delivering relevant assistance for livelihoods restoration. In some cases delays in issuing the contract led to the loss of the desired candidate. In other cases delays in contract renewal have forced officers to leave their post for a few weeks in the middle of important assignments.

2. Procurement

The speed in delivery of inputs varied from one country to the next, in relation with the local organizational set-up, the procedures adopted, the presence of required goods on local markets or the degree of competition with other organizations trying to procure the same sorts of items.

Taking these factors into account, there still seems to be a clear relationship between the procurement strategy adopted by FAO in a particular country on the one hand, and the speed of delivery and technical soundness of items delivered on the other. The comparison between the two smaller programmes, Thailand and the Maldives, is instructive in this regard.

In Thailand, procurement was overwhelmingly conducted locally by the Regional Office, which had spending authority of US$100,000[25], and the programme procured faster than in other countries. Most purchase orders were completed in February and various inputs could be delivered to beneficiaries as early as March-April 2005, i.e. three to four months after the disaster^{^[26]}.

In the Maldives, items were purchased mainly through purchase orders raised at headquarters, as many of the selected supplies (e.g. fishing gear, compost) could not be obtained locally. The procurement process, from the purchase request to the delivery of the goods to FAO, lasted four months on average, with the first items arriving in Malé in September 2005. Due to further logistical constraints in the country, the delivery to final beneficiaries extended over many months, well into 2006.

In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, two procurement missions were fielded from February to April 2005 as soon as lists of items were identified by TCEO. However, no satisfactory technical specification and list of suppliers was made available to the procurement missions before arrival in country, and the missions could not entirely fulfil their TORs.

In Indonesia, the majority of the items were purchased in country. However, the Banda Aceh office faced a particularly complicated situation in that it did not have any financial autonomy during the whole of 2005.[27] All payments had to be requested through Jakarta, which added delays to the process. When a second procurement mission was fielded in Banda Aceh from June to July 2005 with the idea of buying locally, it found out that FAO had become quite unpopular among local suppliers, who insisted on being paid on delivery or even in advance. Hence local procurements can only work if they are coupled with sufficient financial authority decentralised to the field.

It should be stressed that the “prime factor” approach followed by FAO rules (tender assessed against either the lowest price or the quickest delivery, as defined in advance) can lead to suboptimal choices imposed by the rules. In Indonesia, a large volume of fertilizers was tendered by the procurement mission with a delivery time set to three weeks, as requested by the technical team in the field in an attempt to catch the April-May rice planting season. Out of the three suppliers who responded to the tender, one was prepared to deliver in three weeks, the second in four weeks and the third in seven weeks. Applying the “prime factor” rule, the procurement committee awarded the contract to the supplier with the quickest stated delivery time although he charged more than the others. Unfortunately this supplier was not able to deliver the required quantity of fertilizers within the three weeks limit. Finally it was decided to cancel this contract and re-tender. The fertilizer was delivered to farmers in September 2005. Perhaps another lesson from this example is that excessive delivery pressure and expectations may be counter-productive to a well-planned, orderly and efficient programme. In the case of Indonesia, the beneficiary assessments indicated that the distributions of rice seeds during June - July 2005 came too early in many instances, as most paddy fields and drainage systems were not yet rehabilitated. Most of the seed was only planted in September - October 2005.

In Sri Lanka, some procurement activities were implemented with little regard to administrative rules in order to save time. The Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (MFAR) had insisted on implementing a large boat repair programme through the parastatal Cey-Nor. Based on a verbal agreement in principle, Cey-Nor started repairing boats before the signature of any contract with FAO. When the procurement of spare parts to repair boat engines, contracted to local private companies, became delayed due to a taxation dispute with the Government, Cey-Nor resorted to purchasing spare parts on its own without a contractual arrangement with FAO. The resulting contracting and auditing wrangle lasted until 2006, and feedback from beneficiaries made evidently clear that Cey-Nor’s performance should have been monitored more rigorously to ensure adequate service delivery. However, in retrospect this boat repair activity, by shortcutting FAO procedures, could be implemented quickly and did contribute to the speedy recovery of the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka. Repairing boats was clearly the best technical option in Sri Lanka, and repairing them fast helped ensure the quick recovery of fisheries based livelihoods.

While the agricultural inputs were all procured locally from an FAO project in the conflict-stricken North and from other local suppliers (including from farmers themselves in the case of the livestock distribution programme), the fishing gear could only be purchased internationally because national manufacturers were not able to meet the huge demand for fishing gear after the tsunami in Sri Lanka. The ERCU in Colombo requested a very large procurement of fishing gear in June 2005, worth about US$2.7 million. The process ran into significant delays after erroneous technical specifications were attached to the bid invitation. Correcting this mistake took months and the fishing gear was ultimately received in Sri Lanka from January to March 2006 with a few items still to be received as late as June 2006, a year after the country office had requested them and at a time when most active fishermen had already replaced the fishing gear lost in the tsunami.

The first lesson to draw from this admittedly extreme example is that there are quite a number of FAO units involved in requesting (TCEO in headquarters, ERCU in the field), clearing (Technical Department at headquarters with input from consultants in the field), issuing (AFSP), and evaluating (all of the above, PRC) international tenders and bids. This long chain of actors spread across time zones mechanically generates lengthy correspondence, slows down communications, and increases risks of miscommunication. The second lesson is that, if indeed international procurements are by nature slower than local ones, sometimes they are the only available option or offer better value for money. However, needs in the field change quickly, as the affected population is progressively recovering from the shock through its own efforts and thanks to other aid providers. Therefore, large international procurements sometimes deliver too late, at a stage when the equipment might not be needed anymore. Splitting large international procurements in smaller and quicker-to-produce quantities, specified and ordered over a period of twelve months on the basis of periodic recovery assessments, may reduce this risk.

3. Letters of Agreement

Significant delays occurred in the approval of Letters of Agreement (LoAs)^{^[28]} above US$25,000 that could not be approved in the field (except in Thailand). The problem was somewhat eased through the increase up to US$100,000 in the authority granted to the TCE Director.[29] Still in some instances, the approval of LoAs greatly delayed project implementation, such as the case of seven LoAs prepared under OSRO/SRL/505/ITA in Sri Lanka, which works through seven Italian NGOs to develop 14 “model coastal communities” and promotes Integrated Coastal Area Management (ICAM) at the community level. The project became operational in May 2005 and is set to end in April 2007. After a series of PRA studies, an aid package was designed for each of the community and LoAs prepared with seven Italian NGOs. The process of drafting and approving the LoAs took over six months, largely because the activities covered by these LoAs were complex and multi-sectoral. The documents had to be cleared by numerous technical divisions. Delays occurred even when TCEO could approve the LoAs (total value less than US$100,000), due to a long editing and quality control process at headquarters.[30] Another issue that took some time to clear was the “tied-aid” aspect, i.e. the requirement that FAO work with Italian NGOs only.

Over and beyond this particular example, it should be stressed that all NGOs found the FAO LoAs and international bank transfer procedures unwieldy and overly lengthy. National NGOs were particularly vulnerable due to their small cash-flow and reduced administrative capacity.

4. Operational capacity in a competitive environment

Finally, the issue of operational capacity needs to be assessed within the broader context of emergency operations. FAO is not the only organisation facing the issue of insufficient operational capacity in this context. The TEC as well as evaluations commissioned by other UN organizations and NGOs have highlighted the significant operational challenges posed by post-tsunami reconstruction activities. More generally, operational capacity in emergency progammes is recognised as an area for improvements.[31] FAO needs to keep pace with this evolution.

Most emergency operations take place in a very fluid and at times competitive environment. The tsunami generated a massive influx of private and public funds, and the organizations to which these funds were entrusted frequently competed with one another for such scarce resources as qualified national staff, implementation partners, replacement assets from suppliers, and even beneficiaries.[32] In such an environment, only the most agile organizations will be in a position to hire sufficient national staff, secure advantageous deals with suppliers or establish their field presence. For all sorts of reasons including its legitimate insistence on technical quality and suitability, FAO may never be as quick-paced and flexible as most NGOs. It should, however, be expected to keep up with other specialized UN organizations involved in emergency and reconstruction assistance. In spite of a number of useful initiatives taken to instil more flexibility in FAO operational processes,^{^[33]} the Organization’s performance remains unsatisfactory in this regard.

Part V – Working with Partners

1. Operational Partnerships

The main partners of FAO in its tsunami response were the governments of the affected countries, donors, NGOs, academic institutes, other UN agencies and International Financial Institutions (IFIs). The relationship with donors has been briefly analysed in Part III - sections 3 and 5 above. The current section reviews the other types of partners and moves on to analysing their relationship(s) with FAO.

Governments of tsunami-affected countries

In all countries covered by the evaluation, the relationship with the Government was a key factor in the FAO response. The general approach followed, the content of the programme and its deliverables, its beneficiary selection processes were largely influenced by central and, to a lesser extent, decentralized governments. The extent of this influence depended on the country concerned and evolved over time. It was probably strongest in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, with prominent government roles in defining programme deliverables, selecting beneficiaries and delivering assistance through line ministries and parastatals.

However, this strong relationship started unfavourably in Sri Lanka, where FAO had to manage difficult relations with the ministries of fisheries and agriculture of the ex-coalition government. The Government initially resented the fact that most projects had been designed and some already started by FAO without formal government approval, under the assumption that the Government had requested and approved the Flash Appeal through which projects were delineated. There was also a perception in Sri Lanka as a whole and in the Government in particular that foreign agencies and NGOs were using too much of their resources to pay for expatriates, offices and cars, and too little to help tsunami victims. This limited level of trust initially resulted in a lot of difficulties, notably from the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (MFAR), including blocking key consultancies and holding project equipment in customs, at the expense of tsunami-affected fishermen. Relations with government authorities markedly improved over 2005 and 2006.

Government influence on the FAO tsunami response was less pronounced in Indonesia, where the years of conflict, the ensuing peace process and the current decentralisation policy created an environment where decentralised governments had to beef up their capacity to take on their new governance role and participate in reconstruction just after the tsunami had severely hurt their capacity.[34] The initial needs assessment phase saw good collaboration with central ministries. However, in 2005 FAO delivered its assistance primarily via NGOs, and communication with line ministries suffered, especially at the national level. Links existed between the FAOR and the Ministry of Agriculture in Jakarta but less so with other national authorities, which complained that they got little information on FAO programmes and consultants’ work.

In Aceh, FAO has worked with the Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi (Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency for Aceh and Nias - BRR) since its creation in mid 2005 to set up monthly coordination meetings and various workshops, and made a number of technical advisors available to BRR. The link between FAO and BRR was considered to be very valuable by other partners (WB, ADB, NGOs). However, FAO and BRR implemented their respective programmes independently from one another. The very fact that BRR started to implement its own rehabilitation programme in 2006 came at the expense of its coordination role, not just for lack of staff capacity to play both roles, but also because of the potential conflict of interest between the two functions.

In Thailand, the Government was formally involved at every stage of the programme through a Steering Committee regrouping various departments of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MOAC) and FAO. FAO retained control over key steps of the response, for instance approving the lists of beneficiaries in final instance. Provincial governments played an important role in beneficiary selection, input distribution and follow up.

Non-Governmental and Community-Based Organizations

TCEO routinely delivers much of its assistance through NGOs. In the tsunami response, the intensity of the relationship with NGOs could be characterised as inversely proportional to the strength of the relationship with the Government. In Sri Lanka and the Maldives, little role in delivery was left to non-state actors such as fishers' cooperatives or NGOs. In Indonesia, most of the FAO programme was implemented in partnership with national and international NGOs, at least in 2005. The involvement of decentralised governments increased in 2006. The Indonesia programme was also noteworthy in its efforts to work with traditional organisations and CBOs (Box 2). For procedural reasons, entering into direct partnerships with small, informal organisations proved difficult and the Organization finally resorted to work with traditional organisations and CBOs via the conduit of registered and well-established NGOs.

Thailand once again presented a fairly balanced situation, with national NGOs initially acting as a “watchdog” in the beneficiary selection process managed by village headmen and sub-district administrators. This paved the way for a more active involvement of national NGOs and greater use of existing social capital during subsequent phases of the response, for instance working with fishers’ cooperatives to deliver engines under a revolving fund mechanism, implemented through NGOs of the Save the Adaman Network (SAN). The cooperation between FAO, the Government, donor-funded projects such as CHARM, NGOs and cooperatives was described as innovative by national ministry officials.

Overall, FAO tended to work more with national NGOs than with international ones, including in Indonesia. However, the decision to opt for local or international NGOs was largely made pragmatically on a case-by-case basis, depending on the capacity and interest of international and national NGOs to work with FAO. International NGOs presented some advantages over national ones (contracting, reporting and management capacity, cash flow, capacity to advance, complement or repair FAO's assistance), but also some weaknesses (limited knowledge of the local context, weak link with communities and leaders, short-term presence and insufficient commitment to follow up on activities).

Academic and research institutes

Interestingly, quite a number of educational and research institutions participated in the FAO response in one way or another, mainly in providing for training, surveys and studies, but also in the provision of seed from provincial research centers in Sri Lanka and in helping iron out the selection of boat beneficiaries in Indonesia. The main academic institutions involved were:

Thailand: the Coastal Development Center and the Faculty of Forestry of the Kasetsart University, the Prince of Songkra University and the Network of Aquaculture Centers in Asia-Pacific (NACA) provided trainings and conducted damage and recovery studies.
Sri Lanka: the Horticulture Research and Development Institute (HORDI) in the Department of Agriculture helped with salinity testing. Numerous decentralized agriculture research centers provided seeds and technical support.
Indonesia: the Sekolah Usaha Perikanan Menengah (SUPM, Fisheries High School) located near Banda Aceh, reviewed all the boat beneficiary lists produced by NGOs, Panglima Laot and government officials with a view to verify, consolidate and finalize them. The local Universitas Syiah Kuala was also an important partner involved in training and surveys, and NACA backstopped the aquaculture rehabilitation programme.
The Maldives: the Faculty of Engineering and Technology helped develop the FRP training curriculum.

These varied involvements were well received by the respective governments and communities, and testify to the growing importance of technical and policy support in the FAO tsunami response. Use of local capacity – supplemented by foreign expertise as and when necessary – was not only cost-effective in the short term, it may also prove to be the best way to build up local disaster mitigation capacity over the longer term through learning-by-doing.

Other UN agencies and IFIs

Cooperation with other UN agencies such as UNOCHA or UNDP was significant in Sri Lanka and in Thailand but was found to be weaker in Indonesia, where FAO opted to develop a close relationship with the BRR created by the Government to coordinate reconstruction and rehabilitation activities in Aceh and Nias, and did not participate sufficiently in UN-led coordination forums. As a result, the Organization did not develop operational partnerships with other UN organizations in Aceh, though the situation appeared better in Nias Island. More is said in the next section about the importance for FAO of participating in cross-sectoral, district-level coordination forums led by decentralized governments and other UN organizations.

The main area of cooperation with IFIs (World Bank, IFAD and the ADB) was through the participation of the FAO Investment Center (TCI) in the development of recovery strategies in Sri Lanka and Indonesia and of investment programmes for IFIs in Indonesia and the Maldives.

Potential for more strategic partnerships

FAO managed to forge partnerships with a wide array of stakeholders and organisations for the purpose of implementing its tsunami response. The proven capacity of the Organization to relate and work with a wide range of state and non-state actors at local, national and global levels is striking, even though its contractual arrangements may need substantial adjustments to make better use of this potential strength.

The question arises therefore of whether FAO shouldn’t try to forge partnerships on broader issues of importance for all actors. Over and above the narrow needs of programme implementation, there might be an opportunity for more strategic partnerships with the civil society in particular, leveraging the credibility of the Organization to advocate technically, socially and environmentally sound practice by all stakeholders. To a limited extent, such a role was achieved through sectoral coordination.

2. Coordination with a broader set of partners

Support to sectoral coordination

Coordination of emergency and early rehabilitation assistance in the agriculture sector has been a classic function for FAO since at least the Rwanda emergency programme in the mid 1990’s. In the tsunami response, some governments – notably the Government of Indonesia and the provincial government of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (NAD) – as well as a few donors such as Norway expected FAO to play a strong coordination role in fisheries and agriculture. The need for coordination was felt by all, as the tsunami disaster generated a massive influx of private and public funds and hundreds of NGOs, private sector organisations, donors and agencies quickly crowded the affected coastline. The multiplicity of players, especially in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, as well as their lack of habit of cooperating made it very difficult from the onset. Developing and maintaining links with them, and establishing credibility as a capable and impartial technical agency succeeded in instances; however, at times FAO appeared to compete with international NGOs especially when looking for implementation partners for delivery of relief items.

The extent of coordination support provided by FAO and its success varied significantly from one country to another, according to the context, the experience and interest of the Emergency Coordinator, as well as the resources available. Not too surprisingly, government officials, donors and colleagues also had their vision of what FAO should do. At times, it matched what FAO was doing, at times, it did not and there has been disappointment.

In Sri Lanka, FAO helped the Government organise monthly meetings open to all stakeholders at the national level as early as March 2005, in an attempt to orchestrate efforts toward appropriate, effective and coherent delivery of assets in fisheries and agriculture. Strongly supported by the Government and widely appreciated by key actors, FAO’s ambitious attempt in Sri Lanka achieved good visibility but nevertheless failed to bring much order to the overall tsunami recovery efforts of all stakeholders and to control excessive delivery of fishing assets. In Indonesia, the FAO efforts towards coordination were deemed to be useful and the link with BRR was appreciated by IFIs and NGOs, but these efforts were not regular and limited in their outreach (few NGOs participated in meetings). As for Thailand, until recently, FAO coordination efforts were mostly limited to working harmoniously with the Government.

Participation in local coordination forums

FAO played a significant role in helping the respective governments coordinate the post-tsunami rehabilitation at the central level (Colombo, Aceh), but its role in supporting coordination forums at the local level (district, region, etc.) was less convincing, and only attempted in Sri Lanka where some level of district-level presence was achieved. In Indonesia, FAO tended to perceive the UNORC-supported thematic and area-based coordination forums at the provincial and district levels as redundant rather than complementary with BRR-led and FAO-supported sectoral forums. The lack of FAO presence at the district level also constrained its capacity to participate in district-level coordination forums supported by UNORC and chaired by local authorities.

Achievements against various coordination objectives

One of the difficulties in analysing this issue is that coordination is a loose and broad term. Generally defined as “working together harmoniously”, it is subject to varied interpretations and expectations. The conceptual framework described in Box 3 makes a useful distinction between four different levels of coordination, each more demanding but also potentially more rewarding than the previous one.

At the first level (information sharing), FAO attempted to facilitate the exchange of information and views between donors, the Government and NGOs in all RTE countries. In that, it used a comparative advantage derived from its neutrality and capacity to act as a mediator between state and non-state actors, in what often amounts to a difficult balancing act.

On the second level (support harmonious yet autonomous decision making), FAO played a significant role in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. It advocated for good quality boat construction so as to avoid the delivery of unsafe boats, alerted the respective governments and other actors delivering fishing assets of the risk of rebuilding an excessive fishing capacity, mapped boat and fishing gear delivery and plans so as to re-orient actors towards geographic areas with lesser levels of support, and supported the development of medium and longer-term rehabilitation and development strategies, master plans and programmes for the fisheries and agriculture sector. These messages and strategies were largely relayed through the national coordination forums set up by the government and FAO, as well as by the national and sometimes international media. The RTE is not in a position to conclude whether or not these efforts made or will make a significant difference in respective programmes of all the actors involved and ultimately at the community level, but the appeared generally well focussed and quite relevant in a context characterized in the TEC thematic report on coordination as “the chaos created by the multiplicity of players in Sri Lanka and Indonesia”.^{^[35]}

On the third level (monitor, streamline and re-orient the work of all partners) FAO was expected by some in Sri Lanka, and to a lesser extent Indonesia, to help streamline the activities of NGOs and other actors in the fisheries, agricultural and forestry sectors. The most substantial effort in this direction was witnessed in the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka, where the Government attempted to develop a central system for beneficiary registration and set up a comprehensive beneficiary database.[36] The teams in charge of early damage assessments at the district level (“District Disaster Committees” composed of the MP of the area and other district officials) issued beneficiary lists, based on which “entitlement cards” were later issued by the central MFAR. These entitlement cards should have allowed all the various implementing partners to check whether someone had already received a given type of assistance. FAO worked through this system and supported its implementation at the district level through the collection of NGOs’ beneficiary lists.

The system was plagued by a number of problems. There was no formal mechanism for contesting the list of beneficiaries and decisions in this regard were left to the discretion of the district fisheries inspectors. Several NGOs and even the National Development Bank disregarded a system that they perceived as tainted by bribery and politically manipulated. As a result of this ambitious but unsuccessful coordination attempt, significant duplications and overlaps occurred between agencies and many non-fishers received fishing gear.[37]

Whether one should expect an agency like FAO to effectively contribute to coordination on the “third level” (monitor, streamline and re-orient the work of all partners) is open to question. FAO was and is dealing with a multitude of participants over whom it has no authority. Such a role appears the prerogative of the host government, but ministries or governmental coordinating agencies were not always in a position to get the level of cooperation required even from governmental institutions operating their own relief programmes. Harmonizing the activities of hundreds of NGOs and charitable organisations, who all had their own donors and independent interventions, represented an insurmountable task. Whether NGOs should be better regulated other than voluntarily is also debatable since independence is one of their major strengths.

However, FAO could have enhanced its coordination role by more consistently providing reliable information not otherwise available (aid tracking and recovery monitoring). In Sri Lanka, the lack of consistency between some recovery studies may have weakened FAO’s case.[38] Survey methodologies should have been communicated more explicitly and potential biases identified when communicating the results. FAO could also have done more to promote the transparency, integrity and credibility of the central fisheries beneficiary registration system, rather than limiting its support to technical aspects.

Finally, achievement against the fourth level (joint endeavours) fell in the category of programmatic partnerships, reviewed in section 1 above. It goes without saying that such joint endeavours benefited and often stemmed directly from information sharing and other coordination efforts. In turn, FAO implementing partners seem to have attended coordination meetings more consistently than other actors.

Part VI – Quality, Adequacy and Impact of the FAO Tsunami Response

1. Beneficiary selection

Equity vs. capacity

By definition, activities that consist in the replacement of lost individual assets lend themselves to helping the relatively better-off segments of society, i.e. those who owned those assets in the first place before the disaster (land owners, boat owners, etc.). This issue was insufficiently recognised in project documentation. Asset replacement projects typically pursue two distinct and at times conflicting objectives: rebuild the economy rapidly and efficiently, which calls for helping good, established asset managers, and help the most vulnerable segments of society overcome the disaster, under the assumption that the better-off can take care of themselves. In practice, FAO generally supported both small and large fishermen and farmers affected by the tsunami, with significant variations.[39] However, this could become a more explicit two-pronged strategy implemented more coherently throughout countries and projects if the tension between the two objectives was more clearly analysed, recognised and communicated.

There are valid arguments in support of both objectives. On the one hand, a bias in favour of established asset managers is often unavoidable, as was the case in boat replacement and the distribution of fish processing equipment in Indonesia. Both deep sea fishing and fish processing are competitive and specialised activities which require skills, experience, knowledge and working capital. In the case of deep sea fishing, the profession is often transmitted from father to sons and, in that of fish processing, from mothers to daughters. In such instances, experience entrepreneurs are more likely than inexperienced ones to successfully run their business and create jobs. Supporting only the poor, who often lack the experience in managing complex assets but rely on employment and family transfers to make a living, may therefore prove counterproductive. On the other hand, the better-off often enjoy greater access to credit, formal or informal, and/or may have retained sufficient resources to rebuild their business by themselves. Excluding vulnerable households may lead to elite capture and entrench pre-existing inequalities.[40]

On this admittedly complex issue, the RTE has argued that the Millennium Development Goals to which the Organization has subscribed require an attempt to reach out to the poor and to try and include them in its programmes together with established asset managers, even if at times this could mean donating to the poor assets that they may not have possessed before the disaster. The goal should be to reconstruct sustainable livelihoods, and not necessarily pre-existing ones. In this sense, there is a ‘fitness for purpose’ dimension to reconstruction. Well-targeted livelihoods diversification activities can be advisable when coming back to previous practices is impossible or unadvisable, or when Government or communities themselves react to the disaster by establishing more secure, sustainable and diversified livelihoods. If this is the case, the capacity to properly manage the donated asset becomes more important than the ownership of the asset prior to the disaster.

Another important consideration is whether asset distributions are perceived as fair locally, at the district and village levels where they have the greatest potential for creating tensions.[41] In this respect, a few useful lessons can be drawn from FAO post-tsunami operations.

Distributions and redistributions

In the agricultural sector, the RTE observed a general tendency by communities to spread the assistance further than intended in project documents, i.e. to share those predefined packages that were easy to split (seed, fertilizer) with a larger group of beneficiaries than intended by the programme, sometimes in full consultation with FAO and its implementation partners, and sometimes not. Interviewed communities explained that they did so in order to avoid the social tensions that would always result from a distribution to only some of the tsunami victims in a community, or in some cases, to take care of the discrepancies between the standard package offered and the variety of land areas cropped by beneficiaries. Some large assets (e.g. tractors, cows) were not easy to share, but even in such cases, some communities opted for collective ownership of the assets, again as a way to reduce conflicts. The case of the hand-tractors distributed in Indonesia is a typical example.

The RTE concluded that input redistributions among villagers are a positive thing as long as they are voluntary and help correct disparities between the supply and the demand for assets. They should not be seen as a problem but as the solution to a problem, i.e. the difficulty to give to all those who need assistance. Such redistributions increase the number of beneficiaries and reduce conflicts, but obviously decrease the amount of assets each beneficiary receives. Using the sustainable livelihoods conceptual framework, one could say that the distribution of physical assets put the social capital of benefiting communities to test. Such distributions can threaten social cohesion, and communities have to tap into their social capital to manage them.

The RTE did witness one case of more competitive beneficiary selections in the agriculture sector, in a peri-urban setting in Indonesia, where the need to pay high rental fees for land, amongst other competitive pressures, acted as a disincentive to the wider sharing of vegetable seed among beneficiaries.

In the fisheries sector, beneficiary selection proved on average more contentious and difficult than in the agriculture sector. Redistributions were only rarely witnessed among fishermen, and interviewed fishers in all countries tended to be more argumentative than farmers about the programme and its beneficiary selection processes. It appears that the process to arrive at beneficiaries lists for boats in Indonesia was rather contentious. FAO had to set up a team from a local fisheries school, SUPM, to verify and crosscheck all the beneficiary lists prepared by the NGOs, local officials and the Panglima Laot. In Sri Lanka, interviewed boat owners were quite vocal in denouncing cases of favouritism in the distribution of resin and matting for boat repair.

A primary reason was that the sort of items distributed (boats, engines) could not be divided or shared with a large number of people. Even when items were by nature sharable – fishing gear and fish processing equipment – the tendency was for beneficiaries to keep all their entitlement, and/or barter or sell their excess gear rather than donate them. In Indonesia, fish processing equipment was not redistributed to the larger group of processor beneficiaries, probably because this particular business can be quite competitive, with competition among processors for a limited supply of fish, for physical space on the beach necessary to dry fish, and for marketing outlets.

Other factors contributed to this contrast between the two sectors:

FAO has a long-standing experience with agricultural emergencies, including prior to the tsunami in Sri Lanka;
the importance of the damage was more limited – and the rehabilitation response usually simpler – in agriculture than in fisheries;
expectations for assistance – and opportunities to earn cash quickly with a restored production capacity – were also much higher among fishers than among farmers, hence the greater frustration when expectations were not met;
the value of the distributed packages tended to be higher in fisheries than in agriculture;
the intrusion in fisheries reconstruction of political considerations in choices which should have been mostly technical or social; and
the number of key actors involved in the response to the disaster was very large in fisheries, hence a more chaotic beneficiary selection process, while FAO was the main if not the only agency distributing a large number of assets to farming communities at least during 2005.

In conclusion on this subject, the tendency to share or redistribute assets was limited to assets contributing to the reconstruction of self-subsistence activities (paddy, small scale vegetable production, and to a certain extent livestock) but applied much less to commercial and competitive domains (commercial vegetable production, fish drying, and to a lesser extent boats and fishing gear). In the latter cases, the tendency for elite capture was harder to resist.

Gender and cultural minorities in beneficiary selection

Women’s livelihoods did not receive the attention they deserved at the very beginning of the FAO response, largely because most of the damage was in the fisheries sector and the focus FAO chose – defined primarily by its recognised technical competences – was on repairing or replacing boats and gear for fishermen. Fishing is typically a male activity in the four countries surveyed, and an important argument at the outset was that fishing activity would create early income and help ‘kick-start’ local economies.

There was some moderate progress during 2005. Nutritional training in Sri Lanka reached 2,000 beneficiaries, almost all of whom women. Support was provided to Indonesian fish dryers, 30% of them female. In the agricultural sector, the women met by the RTE missions considered they had received their due share of assistance. Widows have systematically been included as input beneficiaries for staple crops and women constitute an important proportion of beneficiaries whenever cash crops are concerned (fruits and vegetables in the Maldives and Indonesia, hydroponics culture in Thailand, home gardens in Sri Lanka). Whenever a PRA study was carried out, the need to reach women was always taken into consideration.

The RTE concludes that a case can be made for recognising more clearly the different gender roles and adjust the type and timing of interventions to ensure not just inclusion of women for the sake of inclusion, but effective support and impact at the household and micro-economic level, building human, social and technical capacity across market chains.

In terms of equity toward ethnic minorities, Sri Lanka represented the most critical situation, with various cultural groups such as Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese living side by side along some portions of the affected cost, notably in the East. The long-standing conflict in the North, where FAO was also operating, complicated matters further. FAO spared no efforts to assist communities affected by the tsunami in the South, East and North of the country in a balanced and culturally-sensitive way.

Similarly in Thailand, the programme equally assisted affected Buddhist and Muslims communities, and extended assistance to Mogen (so-called “sea gypsies”) fishing communities around Phuket.

2. Impacts on the restoration of livelihoods

Overall, the FAO tsunami response assisted an estimated 110,000 farming and fishing households affected by the tsunami (approximately 500,000 people) through various assets distributions as well as through capacity building, coordination and technical assistance. Table 4 above summarizes the outreach and impact of the physical assets delivered by FAO, based on Beneficiary Assessment results. This section further examines impact on livelihoods reconstruction in the fisheries and agriculture sectors.[42]

Fisheries livelihoods

Overall, the RTE concludes that the fisheries programme was more effective in Sri Lanka than in other countries in the sample, mainly for reasons of timeliness. However, it was also the most contentious. Key responses such as support to the boat repair programme of Cey-Nor were provided very early by short-cutting FAO’s procedures. This created complex accounting issues, but it may have been the price to pay for contributing significantly to the reconstruction of fishing capacity. There were a number of other problems as well: a beneficiary selection process which tended to be politically influenced; a lack of quality spare parts for the repair of boat engines; and a much-delayed procurement of fishing gear, mainly distributed in 2006 at a stage when other agents had supplied an abundance of gear (Figure 4 overleaf). The latter point came in contravention of FAO’s own global position on responsible fishing and local advocacy against the creation of excessive fishing capacity.

In spite of these drawbacks however, it is clear that FAO contributed significantly to the recovery of the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka.

The same statement cannot yet be made in the case of Indonesia, in spite of useful contributions such as the training in boatbuilding and the improvements brought to traditional boat designs. NGOs are increasingly adopting the FAO designs for their own construction work, and though the FAO boat designs may not be used as standards by private boatyards in the future, the latter are likely to incorporate various modifications and improvements from them.

However, these sorts of impacts stemming from technical assistance will take time to materialize, and short-term impacts derived from the delivery of physical assets are likely to remain modest, as the Indonesia fisheries programme was clearly less efficient in producing boats or distributing fishing gear by itself than it was at teaching others how to do it. Deliverables in the fisheries sector were few and late and came at a prohibitively high transaction cost.

To be fair, Indonesia presented a much more difficult context than Sri Lanka, from the points of view of logistics, local institution’s capacity and language. The boat building techniques also differed: Fibre-Reinforced Plastic (FRP) technology had been widely adopted in Sri Lanka for decades, and allowed for relatively quick and inexpensive repair of hulls. In this context, FAO opted to repair boats rather than construct new ones as all other partners were doing. That proved a good decision, the key to a relatively fast, large-scale, and successful remobilisation for all parts of the fleet. In Aceh, Indonesia, almost all boats are built in wood, and introducing FRP more widely would have added further difficulty in restoring capacity. FAO decided to focus on constructing new wooden boats, a much slower process than repairing FRP boats. The supply of timber from sustainable sources became an issue. Design changes were also introduced after the signing of boat building contracts. These were useful from a technical standpoint but necessitated a renegotiation of all contracts and a decrease in the number of boat to be built.

In aquaculture, construction work, albeit not to ideal standards, was useful in restoring production capacity in Aceh. Attempts to build local capacity in hatchery production and support services are potentially valuable, as is the technical guidance on fish pond reconstruction and management principles. However, this guidance needs to be developed around local extensive practices to a larger extent than is currently the case, and taken up more convincingly by partners such as BRR and ADB. In fish processing, the delivery of very basic materials such as boiling pans and drying racks has helped in restarting economic activity when and where the fish supply was available.

In Thailand, the focus on providing well-sourced timber for boat owners to carry out their own repairs proved to be effective. The response was very timely and efficiently delivered, but impact in the fisheries sector suffered at least initially from incorrect asset specifications and in the case of aquaculture, high sea bass seed mortality rates.

Input specifications and adequacy in meeting beneficiaries’ requirements have also been a problem elsewhere, especially for fishing gear which can vary significantly within a given country. In most cases, the beneficiaries adapted the donated materials themselves, sometimes at significant cost. International NGOs were also able to complement FAO inputs since they had access to other sources of funds. This said, fishing techniques of tsunami-affected communities could have been studied in greater detail in Indonesia – particularly on the West coast and Nias Island – and to a lesser extent in Thailand. The case of Sri Lanka where the gear was largely adequate technically illustrates the importance of working with seasoned international and national staff with a good grasp of local fishing techniques.

In the Maldives, the fisheries sector largely recovered by itself, with boat owners undertaking most of the boat and engine repairs. The option to use donated fishing gear to compensate owners of large dhoni boats who had repaired their boats themselves was found to be not cost-effective: recipients had to sell the received gear, which in most cases meant that gear painstakingly transported to dozens of islands by FAO had to be shipped back to Malé by the beneficiaries in order to be sold there. This option was clearly a result of accepting an in-kind donation defined on the basis of insufficient damage data, and then trying to make the best possible use of it in the face of emerging needs. The replacement of traditional wooden bokkharas (small multi-purpose boats) with a new FRP design, with construction skills imparted locally, was well appreciated and reasonably effective, especially the design aspect, but it is too early to tell whether it will have a significant impact on fishing vessels and catches.

Agriculture livelihoods

The overall picture that emerges in the agriculture sector is one of effective distributions of appropriate items. With the exception of Indonesia, the damage in the agriculture sector was much less severe than in the fisheries sector, and hence the task at hand was less difficult. In Sri Lanka for instance, it was reported that FAO could assist almost all affected farmers in one way or another.

In Indonesia, hand tractors, fruit trees and fertiliser were all widely appreciated. The quality of the distributed seed was sometimes an issue, with high moisture contents in air-tight packaging leading to low germination rates (rice, groundnut). The rice varieties were appropriate but for a number of reasons (presence of flooded conditions or debris in affected paddy fields, distributions poorly timed against planting seasons, availability of cash-for-work or other employment opportunities, and availability of food aid in Indonesia as late as March 2006[43]) were not always used by the beneficiaries as and when intended. Some rice seed initially distributed along the east coast also failed to grow in water-logged fields.

Indeed, a significant gap in the FAO agriculture programme in Aceh concerned the physical rehabilitation of coastal paddy fields. Initial needs assessments identified the issue of deposits in coastal paddy fields and clogging of irrigation and drainage systems as an important area of concern and need. However, RTE field visits and beneficiary assessments indicated that the issues of field rehabilitation and drainage were not sufficiently addressed. It took an inordinate amount of time to debate whether the Organization could afford to contract small, informal organisations to implement cash-for-work projects to clear fields of debris and repair drainage channels, as proposed by the field. Once the cash-for-work modalities were agreed upon, they were tested on 380 ha in two sites near Banda Aceh. These two experiences were only partial successes, for reasons analysed in Box 2 p.27. The experiment did not go any further. Much coastal irrigation and drainage infrastructure along the west coast of Aceh were still in need of rehabilitation during the third RTE mission in mid-2006, which reduced the impact of the FAO rice seed distribution.

Similarly, the effects of the tsunami on soil salinity have been studied in one district by the Indonesian SPFS, but more concerted and systematic research could have been useful to assess the evolution of salinity in the field. The electric conductivity meters handed out to district MoA staff were only sporadically used.

These considerations apply to Sri Lanka as well but to a lesser degree, as drainage systems were less severely damaged than in Aceh. The agricultural inputs distributed in the South and the West coasts have allowed for the early resumption of agriculture and horticulture production. The offer of assets and services has widened recently with the provision of simple and short training on crop management or animal husbandry and this was well received. The rice varieties distributed for the last maha season were locally adapted and tolerant to salinity and they seem to have produced good yields in most cases, probably thanks to the associated distribution of fertilizer. Similarly, there does not appear to be any major problem in the distributed varieties for vegetable crops and other field crops. However, the suitability of the cattle breed distributed (Jersey crossbred) may be an issue, as previous experiences by the SPFS on distribution of Jersey crossbreds in warm coastal areas have not been positive.

In Thailand, the positive effect of the soil reclamation inputs (gypsum, organic fertiliser) on soil salinity was confirmed by interviewed beneficiaries. The distributed 300 kg of animal feed per beneficiary allowed for 10 buffaloes to be fed for a period of one month to one month and a half in the three-month dry season when much grass had been burnt by the salt. Though it will take four to seven years for the impact of the distributed tree seedlings to be seen, these inputs were well appreciated as returns are potentially very positive. The nethouses and hydroponic units distributed later in the response are more complex items and their profitability is not yet assured. Progress has been made in reducing production costs, but less so in accessing the intended high-end tourism industry market. Another core problem is the high capital cost of the hydroponic units. Recipients of these systems will be able to derive continued benefits until major capital replacement is required. However, they could not afford to replace their unit or expand their production. Further training and strict monitoring will be required well after the project period, and the role of agricultural extension in support of these technologies will be important.

In the Maldives, the tasks were in many ways more complex and challenging, not least because of the potentially hostile environmental conditions for transporting plant materials. The large delivery achieved in such conditions is a tribute to the FAO and MFAMR delivery teams, but was not always matched by the ability of recipients to use the delivered items. The agricultural kit seemed to contain far more cuttings and trees than was necessary for a single homestead garden, at least for some species (chilli, sweet potato), leading to part of the kits not being used. In some instances, communities explained that they did not need all of the packages distributed to them. Those beneficiaries who could use most of their kit are facing marketing problems at harvest time. Most islands are sparsely populated and cannot absorb a significant surplus. The Malé market is far away, and resorts typically rely on imports rather than on local agricultural produces.

3. Impact on natural resources

This section concerns mainly the fisheries (capture fisheries and aquaculture) and the forestry sectors, as there is no major natural resource issue in agriculture.

Fisheries sector

The fishing gear distributed by FAO was generally in accordance with sustainable fishing practices and should not lead to serious problems. The FAO aquaculture rehabilitation programme in Aceh focussed on the reconstruction of pre-existing fish pounds in areas outside the green belt instituted by the Government. This careful approach was appropriate.

More broadly speaking, much has been said about the likely negative impact on fish stocks of excessive fishing capacity created by the great amount of gear distribution and boat building by all actors that followed the tsunami. A recovery assessment in Sri Lanka indicates that there are already more boats in the country than before the tsunami, particularly small boats donated in large number by NGOs. The early availability of small boats, combined with the shortage of expensive high-sea fishing gear in 2005, seem to have temporarily resulted in excessive and destructive rock fishing of lobster in some inshore areas, as lobster nets are relatively inexpensive.

Similarly along the Andaman coast in Thailand, the number of small fishing boats and the average fishing capacity of each boat now seem to exceed pre-tsunami levels. In Indonesia, boat construction is taking longer, but indications are that pre-tsunami levels of fishing capacity will be exceeded if all boat construction projects are implemented as planned. Maximum targets for new boat construction have been issued by FAO and the BRR to try and prevent or control this outcome.

However, one may not assume a linear relationship between fishing capacity and fishing effort. Boats and gear have first to be used by their beneficiaries before they translate into an actual fishing effort. In Sri Lanka, it is estimated that from 15 to 20% of all small boats (traditional crafts and 19-footers) repaired and replaced by all actors so far are unusable because of faulty design or poor repair. The mission observed a large number of idle small boats along the South and West coasts of Sri Lanka and confirmed in interviews that they were not being used. In Banda Aceh, the Panglima Laot Provincial Office estimated that 20% of all newly constructed small boats would never be used because of poor stability, that another 40% would be used for about two years before being discarded, and that only about 40% would be used for a longer time. Another factor limiting the fishing effort has been the high fuel prices over the last two years, which reduced the profitability of some fishing practices. For all these reasons, it is not certain that the fishing equipment replaced or repaired by all partners will systematically result in more unsustainable fisheries than before the tsunami, although harmful practices have been witnessed in some locations.

Forestry sector

The rehabilitation of coastal forests (plantation of mangrove, other coastal forest and also urban trees in Sri Lanka) was still at an early stage in all sample countries during the third RTE mission, and its impact could not be analysed.

In terms of policy advisory, estimates of timber requirements and technical options for local and international sourcing of wood for reconstruction in Aceh were found to be useful by national and international agencies and are being translated into Indonesian at request of the Ministry of Forestry. However, their impact in practice could not be fully determined by the RTE. FAO may have lost ground to other organizations in this sector during 2005, notably in terms of advocacy on the complex policy issues raised by reconstruction in Indonesia, e.g. sourcing timber for reconstruction on which the FAO advice was provided rather guardedly and belatedly given the political sensitivity of this issue. However, in 2006 the FAOR expressed serious concerns over the ecological risks posed by some of BRR fish ponds excavation work in areas covered by mangrove prior to the tsunami, thereby assuming the sort of policy advisory function one would normally expect from a UN specialized agency in its areas of competence. It would appear that this position had an impact on BRR’s field practice, indicating that in post-disaster contexts, policy advice can make a difference when provided promptly and in clear, unambiguous terms.

4. Impact on investment by donors and governments

An original element of the tsunami response was the participation of TCI in the definition of broad reconstruction strategies and ultimately the formulating of investment programmes, in partnership with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

All the governments involved strongly appreciated the support FAO provided in strategy development, and printed later versions of the draft recovery strategies under government cover. These government strategies informed the national response and may also orient donors’ funding either directly (through the parallel formulation of investment programmes for IFIs) or indirectly, through coordination with bilateral donors.

However, the impact of TCI’s involvement in the formulation of IFIs’ investment programmes has not been very clear so far, as project formulation and approval in IFIs remain a very long process. Even when projects are approved and resource earmarked relatively quickly, long negotiations may ensue on operational arrangements, ways and means to spend the budget and technical approaches, as was the case with the ADB in Indonesia. IFI programmes will often start delivering about two years after the date of the catastrophe they are intended to address, at a time when the most immediate production and livelihoods needs have already been taken care of.[44]

5. Transition to reconstruction and development

An effective transition from emergency to longer-term reconstruction and development is highly desirable and was promoted as a significant and distinctive capacity of FAO. In each of the countries covered by the evaluation, FAO has introduced long-term concerns in its emergency and early rehabilitation work and has developed a series of long-term project concept notes. There is significant demand from governments and other stakeholders for a prolonged involvement of FAO, either to meet deferred reconstruction needs or in purely developmental activities. However, FAO was not able to mobilize much development resources to follow upon its large tsunami rehabilitation programme. This may at least in part reflect donors’ priorities, as all tsunami-affected countries belong to the middle-income group, and the perception that the tsunami disaster has already received far more resources than other crises elsewhere.

In all the countries covered by the RTE, there exists a potential for FAO to capitalize on the visibility and presence established during the tsunami response to build up a credible and significant portfolio of longer-term activities.

In Sri Lanka, this transition is already on track. The placement of the fisheries team within the MFAR has potential for supporting good sectoral thematic work as well as establishing or updating capacity for sectoral data and management information. The development of new regulations for multi-day boats and the publication by the Government of the strategy and programme for post-tsunami reconstruction and development of the marine fisheries sector augur well for this evolution.

In Indonesia, the FAO tsunami response and the reconstruction of Aceh in general will last much longer than in other countries due to the severity of the damage. There has been some FAO engagement in longer-term areas, but it has not been very explicit and strategic. The partnerships built with BRR, decentralized authorities, CBOs and NGOs may prove an asset in this regard. A contextual problem in Indonesia is that not all actors are at the same stage in their tsunami response: some NGOs are moving towards longer term participatory development processes and the rehabilitation of more complex infrastructures, while others (e.g. BRR, WFP, INGOs with large tsunami budgets) are still implementing fairly basic, relief-oriented cash-for-work and food aid activities, sometimes disrupting the transition.

In Thailand, the FAO emergency response to the tsunami is now essentially completed. The absence of a dichotomy between the Emergency Coordinator and the FAO Country Representative in Thailand means that unlike in other countries of the RTE sample, there is no “institutional disconnect” (see below) between the emergency arm and the development arm of the Organization at the country level. Some of the late projects implemented under the tsunami response already displayed a strong development orientation.

In the Maldives, the FAO tsunami response was completed and a number of developmental activities started by the end of 2006, including an agriculture master plan, fisheries and forestry sector reviews, plans for a quarantine system, etc.

Part VII – Conclusions and Recommendations

This section concludes the analysis of what amounted to a very complex and challenging programme, and attempts to present in summary form the main conclusions, lessons and recommendations produced by the successive evaluation missions.

The tsunami was described as a very large and atypical emergency, a “freak event”, and it is unlikely that all the lessons learned from the tsunami response would straightforwardly apply to other emergencies, or even to all sudden-onset disasters. However, it can also be argued that the tsunami has magnified and brought into sharper focus many pre-existing deficiencies in the way FAO and the broader “humanitarian and development community” goes about providing relief to emergency-stricken populations around the world.

With the significant resources availed by donors, FAO was able to cover its ground convincingly in the agriculture sector in all countries visited by the RTE, helping a majority of affected farmers restore their capital assets and livelihoods through the distribution of generally appropriate seed, trees, tools and livestock. However, the Organization did little to address the connected issues of drainage and salinity in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. These challenges specific to the tsunami emergency called for innovative interventions, over and beyond the now “classic” seeds and tools distribution modality.

The performance in the fisheries sector was found weaker than in agriculture. The contrast between the two sectors largely reflects the long FAO track record in, and experience with, agricultural emergencies as compared with a lack of such FAO emergency experience in the fisheries sector. New modalities had to be invented, each tailored to the needs and varied nature of fishery-based industries and livelihoods in tsunami-affected countries. Sri Lanka represented the most creative and convincing attempt at rebuilding fisheries through a mix of sectoral coordination, technical assistance and the repair and distribution of generally suitable assets. In Indonesia, Thailand and the Maldives, the FAO contribution to the reconstruction of the fisheries sector was less relevant and significant. Although interesting approaches were tested in promoting safety-at-sea and good practices by other actors, the FAO programme and its influence on other partners in capture fisheries and aquaculture were much less visible than in Sri Lanka and tended to get lost in the plethora of initiatives implemented by other organizations.

The FAO in the forestry sector was small and came rather late. FAO may have lost ground to other organizations in this sector, notably in terms of advocacy on the complex policy issues raised in Indonesia (e.g. sourcing timber for reconstruction). However in 2006, the FAOR expressed grave concerns over the ecological risks posed by some of BRR fish ponds excavation work in areas covered by mangrove prior to the tsunami, thereby assuming this policy advisory function one would normally expect from a UN specialized agency in its areas of competence. The position of the FAOR based on Forestry Project information has had an impact on BRRs field practice with staffing changes having been made.

In summary, FAO struggled to invent new operational modalities to tackle the very peculiar nature and massive extent of the tsunami-inflicted damage and the specific policy issues raised by the reconstruction of coastal areas. The Organization lacked the suppleness necessary to rapidly design, experiment with and scale up new, tailor-made technical responses.

It should be stressed that livelihoods restoration remains a rather new and ground-breaking domain, still poorly understood and under-funded. Besides, it is an area in which operational modalities cannot be standardised to the same extent as in purely humanitarian operations. It takes time and efforts to study complex livelihoods strategies and find the best ways of rebuilding them. Similarly, considerations of equity, economic efficiency and sustainable management of natural resources are much more complex in livelihoods restoration than in humanitarian interventions.

Unwieldy FAO programme procedures and insufficient operational capacity were found to be major constraints during implementation but also in adopting innovative rehabilitation approaches (e.g. cash-for-work, collaboration with community-based organizations). From the evidence at hand, it is clear that low operational capacity negatively affected programme delivery, depleted staff morale, contributed to high staff turn-over rates, and ultimately lessened the cost-effectiveness and the impact of the entire FAO tsunami response. As FAO entered the domain of emergency operations fairly recently (mid-1990s), the Organization has had to approach emergencies with administrative processes and operational resources that were not designed for the fast-paced emergency arena. Today, the FAO emergency operations represent about 40% of the Organization’s overall financial resources. This calls for a significant reinforcement of its operational capacity in the field and a comprehensive review of its administrative processes as they apply to emergency projects.

The lack of a coherent strategic approach at the programme level emerges as a common thread in this report and throughout the response, from needs assessments to programme design, programme implementation, and transition to development. The RTE was perhaps a useful exercise in this regard, as its programme-wide format resulted in debriefing meetings, at headquarters and in the field, where all the concerned FAO staff, consultants, and implementing partners could meet and confront their perspectives on issues of common interest, often for the first time in months.

1. Funding arrangements

Conclusions

Donors support was generous and generally more flexible than in previous disaster responses, some donors allowing for the allocation of funds to broad sectors or geographical areas. However, funds channelled through the UN Flash Appeal had to be used in a limited timeframe (progressively extended from 6 months to a year, then to 18 months). This as well as other limitations of timescale tended to negatively affect the response. In-kind donations from the People’s Republic of China also proved difficult to use effectively.

The SFERA set up by FAO played a critical role to speed up project implementation and cover strategic though yet unfunded needs (e.g. needs assessments or ERCU set up). However, the Fund is currently accounted for as a series of unconnected projects through complex, manual and ad hoc accounting processes.

While FAO was able to mobilize very significant resources for its early rehabilitation programmes, insufficient resources were made available for longer-term reconstruction and development activities. This may in part reflect donors’ priorities and “fatigue” with an emergency perceived as over-funded as compared to other, more recent ones.

Lessons

The Consolidated Appeal Process was designed to fund humanitarian assistance, i.e. to save lives, hence its timescale limited to 6-months. This timeframe poses significant problems for the funding of livelihoods rehabilitation programmes of the type FAO is implementing and, as underlined by the TEC, contradicts principle 9 of the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative[45].

Recommendations	Responsible parties
1. FAO should review the scope of SFERA operations and the reporting requirements of FAO management, individual donors and governing bodies, and should implement appropriate solutions including financial set-up so as to automate accounting.	TCE / AFF
2. FAO should continue to raise the awareness of donors on how useful SFERA was, on the advantages of flexibility and on the cost of conditionality. TCE itself should be more conscious of the risk it takes when accepting some donors’ conditions, and at times should send the right message by turning down funding propositions which come with too many strings attached.	TCE
3. FAO and other organizations involved in livelihood rehabilitation should plead the case for longer timeframes in consolidated and flash appeals before OCHA and the IASC, arguing of the differences between humanitarian / relief assistance destined to save life and relying on “kits” easy to quantify and stockpile, and more complex support to the recreation of livelihoods and food security which involves re-capitalizing affected communities with materials that are likely to change from one crisis to the next.	TCE

2. Operational capacity

Conclusions

Many of the difficulties identified during the RTE and underlined in this report find their roots in the insufficient operational capacity of the Organization, its excessive centralisation of authority and bureaucratic procedures. FAO’s performance in this regard was found lagging compared to that of other UN specialized agencies. Substantial bottlenecks in the tsunami programme were identified, which could and often do repeat themselves in other emergencies. Not all of these bottlenecks resulted from inflexible administrative procedures. In Indonesia, the field structure set up by TCE initially lacked coherence and was only entrusted with the human and financial means necessary to achieve programme goals towards the end of 2005.

Initiatives taken in 2005 and 2006 to instil more flexibility in FAO operational processes are welcome but remain insufficient. For instance, ceilings for delegation of authority to FAORs have been raised to US$50,000, which merely allows FAORs to regain the purchasing power they lost to inflation since the early 1990’s.

Instead of dispatching senior operational and technical staff for long periods of time to the field, FAO resorted to hiring technical consultants with little familiarity with FAO project management procedures, backstopped by missions from headquarters.

While the employment of short-term staff in emergency operations makes practical sense and gives the Organization a flexible instrument for human resource management, mandatory breaks in service for international and national staff proved a severe problem for programme implementation and in maintaining institutional memory and stable contacts with partners.

In Indonesia, FAO has found it difficult to hire and retain a cadre of senior national staff and consultants, and this seriously handicapped the FAO response there.

Lessons

Emergency programmes are fast-paced, high-volume operations that cannot be managed by remote control from headquarters, the role of which is to set priorities and define response and exit strategies rather than to implement programmes. The case of Thailand demonstrates that an experienced FAOR with solid operational capacity and appropriate delegation of authority can implement an emergency response faster and more effectively than when most administrative processes are managed from headquarters.

The “input risks” (risks of loss or embezzlement) involved in decentralising procurement or contracting pale in comparison with the significant “outcome risks” that FAO is currently taking with its lengthy administrative processes, resulting in a poor reputation of the Organization at the field level, late delivery of assistance and reduced usefulness of the delivered inputs.

Reducing staff absences from the field, staff turn-over and the time devoted by TCEO to manage staff and consultancy contracts are prerequisites to raise the quality of the delivered programmes.

National staff of sufficient seniority, experience and credibility are essential to the success of an emergency programme. However, the recruitment of national consultants is beset by numerous problems, including undue limitations in the length of contracts and uncompetitive salary scales.

3. Damage and needs assessments

Conclusions

Damage and needs assessments were widely appreciated by partners, but a poor link has been identified with the design of FAO projects. The absence of experienced project planners or implementers in the assessment teams resulted in key elements for programme design not being addressed in the resulting needs assessment reports.

Most of the early assessments were piece-meal, following sector and sub-sector technical lines, at the expense of cross-sectoral environmental, social and livelihoods issues.

Throughout the response, FAO has attempted to monitor the gradual recovery of the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka and to a lesser extent in Indonesia through various recovery assessments. This work has been much noted and appreciated by partners, but could have been communicated more coherently and should have extended to the agriculture sector.

Lessons

UN specialised agencies have a comparative advantage in providing consolidated damage and needs assessments in their areas of mandate because these assessments require significant technical expertise. However, involving key national and international partners in joint damage and needs assessments helps build up the quality and credibility of the final report.

Needs are constantly changing as communities progressively recover from the initial shock. Hence needs assessments cannot be done once and for all. There is a strong demand for a regular stream of needs and recovery assessments, also called “recovery monitoring”.

Recommendations	Responsible parties
10. In large-scale emergencies, FAO should conduct multi-disciplinary, holistic damage and needs assessments for all areas within its mandate, communicated to all partners through a consolidated document, and should strive to carry them out in cooperation with all relevant FAO technical divisions, and with national agencies and other international organizations (e.g. UNDP, IFIs).	TCE as team leader, Tech. Departments as team members
11. Time and accessibility permitting, needs assessment reports should attempt to cover the following key areas: a) over and beyond damaged assets, an inventory of key assets that were not damaged and that could be used to jump-start the recovery (e.g. seed producers, hatcheries, FAO’s projects); b) an analysis of non-production segments of market chains affected by the disaster (e.g. food processing and marketing); c) an identification of the most affected and vulnerable groups, including women-headed households, ethnic minorities, and “have-nots” such as the land-less; and d) a clear articulation between FAO’s proposed role and priorities and the broad needs of the sector to be covered by others.	TCE (team leader) + Technical Departments (team members)
12. In the tsunami response as well as in other contexts, FAO should try to provide regular recovery assessments in areas of its mandate over a period of approximately two to three years after the disaster, depending on the extent of the damage.	FAOR/ERCU+ Tech. Dpts

4. Strategy setting and programmatic approaches

Conclusions

The RTE highlighted a disconnect between FAO units, linked with a scattered, project-based approach to damage assessments, resource mobilization, project design, implementation and reporting.

In particular, the transition from an emergency and immediate rehabilitation phase, mainly orchestrated by TCE, to a reconstruction and development phase conducted by Technical Departments and Regional Offices could have been more explicitly planned.

The ADG tsunami group, specifically set up to coordinate the FAO tsunami response, discussed and explored issues but unfortunately did not elaborate broadly-agreed corporate strategies, e.g. for the transition from early rehabilitation to longer-term reconstruction and development.

Lessons

There is a need for more programmatic approaches and for an effective corporate mechanism for strategy setting about FAO emergency programmes. Some decisions must be taken at the level of the Organization, for instance decisions about cross-sectoral priorities and approaches, about the best balance between hardware and software, or about the transition between immediate rehabilitation and longer-term reconstruction and development.

Recommendations	Responsible parties
13. The mandate of high-level corporate coordination groups, such as the ADG tsunami group, should be to define shared goals and strategies for the Organisation as a whole, looking forward to an orderly collaboration between units and a smooth transition between early rehabilitation and longer-term reconstruction and development.	TCD

5. Balance between intervention types

Conclusions

The balance of funds allocated to each country and sector was found generally appropriate. More could have been done to mobilise resources for the rehabilitation of paddy field and related irrigation and drainage infrastructure in Indonesia and to a lesser extent Sri Lanka. In Indonesia, sectoral allocations were more evenly split between fisheries and agriculture, perhaps more as a result of the relative ease of implementation of the two sectoral programmes – agriculture was a “good deliverer” very early on while fisheries struggled for a time to establish a viable modus operandi – than as a reflection of the relative needs in each sector.

Although the tsunami response was much more varied and included more technical assistance than previous FAO emergency operations, it still tended to be dominated by “hardware activities” designed to help individual producers recover some of their physical production assets (seeds, fertiliser, livestock, boats and fishing gear), at the expense of: a) community infrastructures (irrigation and drainage channels, fish-landing sites); b) non-production segments of the value chain (support services, marketing) even when these were severely affected by the tsunami; c) “software activities” such as policy advice, sectoral planning, capacity building and coordination.

This “input bias” does not necessarily take into account the comparative advantages of the Organization, and its administrative limitations add to the risk of failure in ambitious supply, procurement or construction programmes.

When present, FAO’s policy guidance and capacity building activities were often much appreciated, particularly in the fisheries sector (e.g. on reconstruction strategies, boat building quality standards and safety at sea). However, many missions from headquarters were poorly coordinated with the concerned ERCU, which reduced their usefulness.

Lessons

Physical assistance, when it responds to real and pressing needs, helps rebuild livelihoods. It also establishes commitment, credibility, visibility and funding. However, FAO is not operating in a vacuum. There are many other organisations capable of distributing production inputs, while FAO can provide good quality technical expertise, capacity building and coordination services in the areas of its mandate in a way few others can.

Techniques and approaches which are relevant at the onset of a disaster response may not be adequate later on, as affected communities gradually reconstruct their productive means. The response needs to follow and support endogenous recovery strategies and processes.

The capture fisheries sector required greater attention to the carrying capacity of the natural resource base than other tsunami-affected sectors, and brought into sharp focus the necessity of adopting a long-term outlook in livelihoods rehabilitation, in order to ensure that the assistance provided in emergency contexts does not lead to unsustainable practices later on.

Technical assistance in the context of emergencies cannot rely on the same approaches and formats as in traditional development assistance. It should remain focused, simple and hands-on. There is a great demand, in particular from national and international NGOs, for simple, hands-on and prolonged training and guidelines focussed on key capacity gaps. Another difference is that policy issues tend to be more pressing and critical, but also more risky politically in highly visible post-disaster contexts than in most development situations.

FAO could have an important advocacy role in building awareness and commitment among donors and providers of humanitarian assistance concerning the need for a broader and longer-term approach to rehabilitation.

6. Procurement and input delivery

Conclusions

Procurements in the fisheries sector tended to be more complicated and less successful than in the agriculture sector, mainly on account of the wide variety and complexity of fishing gear used in any given country. Besides, most fisheries items were not available “off the shelf” and had to be built by the suppliers, which took time.

The speed in delivery of inputs and the technical soundness of items delivered varied considerably from one country to the next, in relation to a number of external factors (organizational set-up, presence of the required goods on local markets, degree of competition with other organizations trying to procure the same sorts of items, etc.), but also in relation with the procurement strategy adopted by FAO in a particular country.

Local procurements were found generally preferable to international ones both for reasons of efficiency and speed and to contribute to a recovery of local markets and supply chains, but they were not always possible (e.g. fishing gear in Sri Lanka, where local manufacturers could not face up to the demand after the tsunami).

Procurement missions in Indonesia and Sri Lanka did not achieve their objectives because technical specifications and suppliers had not been listed beforehand. Rather than rely on procurement missions from headquarters, it seems preferable to build up procurement capacity in the respective field offices.

Excessive delivery pressure and over-optimistic schedules sometimes resulted in low-quality items being procured and/or distributed. Risks are especially high when distributed items are alive (fingerlings, seed, saplings). In some instances, poor storage or handling resulted in low germination or survival rates.

Lessons

The “prime factor” approach to tender evaluation (tender assessed against either the best offer or the quickest delivery, as defined in advance) is too simplistic and rigid and may lead to suboptimal choices imposed by the rules.

Many units are involved in requesting, clearing, issuing and evaluating international tenders and bids (TCEO, ERCU, Technical Department, AFSP, PRC). This long chain of actors spread across time zones mechanically generates lengthy correspondence, slows down communications, and increases risks of miscommunication.

Split orders may be slightly more expensive than bulk orders but they provide for a more flexible response. The savings derived from large bulk orders are generally insignificant as compared to the risks incurred: 1) large international procurements tend to deliver late, at a stage when the affected communities might have already recovered from their losses; and 2) when a large international procurement fails or becomes stalled, it jeopardizes the entire programme.

Local orders stimulate the recovery of the local market, but require the capacity to effect payments rapidly, and hence a strong financial capacity and level of authority in the field, in line with recommendation ‎4 above.

Adherence to beneficiaries’ technical and economic requirements often makes the difference between a usable and a non-usable item. Even when beneficiaries will be able to adapt the equipment to their needs by modifying part of the structure or design, the cost of these alterations will be borne by them, thus tapping into household resources that could probably be put to better use in the aftermath of a disaster.

The best and easiest way to make sure that delivered items fit beneficiaries’ requirements may have been to let tsunami victims decide for themselves what assets they need through vouchers schemes and/or input fairs, as already tried by FAO in Africa.

Recommendations	Responsible parties
17. Tenders should be analysed against a variety of pre-set criteria, including the track record of the bidders with FAO, and criteria used more for guidance than as a straight jacket.	ODG / AFD / AUD
18. Splitting large procurements in smaller and quicker-to-produce quantities, ordered on the basis of regular recovery assessments, would reduce risks of procurement failure or delay and help progressively test and fine-tune programme implementation modalities.	TCE / AFSP / AUD
19. Training material should be designed and in-depth procurement training provided to local and international staff dealing with purchasing and pre-purchasing functions in the field and at headquarters, to ensure that the tasks are carried out within the rules and regulations of the organization. This training effort should be financed by TCE and implemented by AFSP.	TCE / AFSP
20. For large-scale emergency / early rehabilitation programmes, technical clearance should be delegated to country offices if the required technical capacity is available at that level. When the capacity does not exist in country, it should be created, for instance by outposting the appropriate technical officer from headquarters to the country during relevant parts of the programme.	Technical Departments
21. FAO should continue to experiment with voucher schemes on a more significant scale. Partner NGOs and governments would focus on beneficiary selection and documentation, while FAO liaises with suppliers and organizes the fair.	TCE

7. Participatory approaches and SLA

Conclusions

FAO has attempted to use participatory approaches in its tsunami response within the sphere of specific projects, through the use of PRAs and the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. These efforts have often been frustratingly slow, but were useful as they aimed to involve beneficiaries in the design of project activities.

SLA has been used mainly as an analytical tool, identifying needs and priorities, rather than considering it also as an empowering tool.

Lessons

The use of rapid and efficient participatory mechanisms is essential to improve the quality and relevance of the FAO emergency programmes. However, there are risks entailed by overly complex and multi-sectoral approaches in a rehabilitation context, most notably the risk of unduly raising expectations and ultimately failing to deliver significant assistance due to long planning and complex processes. More generally, the role of livelihoods approaches in developing social capital to help manage natural resources and collective infrastructure has been under-recognised so far.

Recommendations	Responsible parties
22. FAO should continue to develop rapid consultation processes for utilizing livelihoods approaches and practical steps for their implementation under rehabilitation and reconstruction contexts, but it should remain mindful of the risk of delays entailed by such approaches in the very limited timescale typical of many “emergency” projects.	TCE
23. Cross-sectorality should be promoted selectively, focusing on precise and pressing issues that can only be successfully addressed this way, such as the green belt issue in Indonesia. The key is that the synergies tapped by working cross-sectorally should offset the additional cost, time and complexity.	TCE

8. Beneficiary selection

Conclusions

Asset replacement projects tended to pursue two distinct and at times conflicting objectives: 1) rebuild the economy rapidly and efficiently, which calls for helping good, established asset managers; and 2) help the most vulnerable segments of society overcome the disaster, under the assumption that the better-off can take care of themselves. This tension is seldom recognised in programme documentation.

However, this tendency to share or redistribute assets was limited to assets contributing to the reconstruction of self-subsistence activities (paddy, small scale vegetable production, and to a certain extent livestock) but applied much less to commercial and competitive domains (commercial vegetable production, fish drying, and boats and fishing gear). In the latter cases, the tendency for elite capture was harder to resist. As a result, beneficiary selection was on average more contentious and difficult in the fisheries than in the agriculture sector.

Lessons

However, the goal should be to reconstruct sustainable livelihoods, and not necessarily pre-existing ones (‘fitness for purpose’ dimension to reconstruction). Well-targeted livelihoods diversification activities can be advisable when coming back to previous practices is impossible or unadvisable. In this sense, the capacity to properly manage the donated asset is therefore a more important criterion than the ownership of the asset prior to the disaster.

When distributed assets are sharable by nature, are not costly and contribute to self-subsistence activities (e.g. most seeds, tools and fertilizer), there does not seem to be any justification to devote extra time and money to sophisticated beneficiary selection processes and stringent criteria, as communities are likely to re-distribute items among their members using their own criteria.

Input redistributions among community members are a positive thing as long as they are voluntary and help correct disparities between the supply and the demand for replacement assets. The important thing is not whether standard eligibility criteria have been fulfilled, but whether asset distributions are perceived as fair locally, at the community levels where they have the greatest potential for creating tensions, and whether they do not create greater disparities than before.

Recommendations	Responsible parties
24. Corporate commitments to vulnerable groups such as women and the poorest of the poor must be translated into action. Activities that tend to be performed by women should be identified and, when they were affected by a disaster, supported on par with masculine activities. Female-headed households should receive their fair share of distributed assets. There should also be an attempt to reach out to the poorest segments of society and to include them in input distribution programmes on par with the relatively better-off, even if at times this would mean donating to the poor access to assets that they may not have possessed before the disaster, as long as they have the capacity to use them well.	ERCU / TCE / ESW
25. For small or sharable assets (e.g. seeds, fertilizer), a simple beneficiary selection process facilitated by an NGO and involving local officials and community members should normally suffice.	ERCU
26. When assets are costly and/or unlikely to being redistributed (planting material for cash crops, tractors, fish processing equipment, fish cages, fishing vessels...) and/or their oversupply likely to have negative consequences (e.g. over production and drops in market prices or over-fishing), beneficiary selection should be carefully planned, conducted and monitored. The beneficiary lists provided by local authorities and village heads should be systematically checked by a neutral third party, e.g. an NGO or an academic institution, and local authorities informed in advance of this independent verification step. For costly assets, FAO should also continue to experiment with sharing arrangements between a small number of beneficiaries, as these seem to have worked well in the tsunami response.	ERCU / TCE

9. Strategic and operational partnerships

Conclusions

In all countries, the Government played a significant and generally useful role in orienting and often co-implementing the FAO-funded programme. However, cases of manipulation of beneficiary lists also occurred.

International NGOs displayed advantages over national ones (contracting, reporting and management capacity) but also weaknesses (insufficient knowledge of the local context, weaker links with communities and leaders than local NGOs). The decision to opt for local or international NGOs for the delivery of FAO assistance was largely and appropriately grounded on pragmatic considerations, depending on the capacity and interest of international and national NGOs to work with FAO.

Traditional organisations and CBOs have also been partners in implementation, and this may represent an original feature of the tsunami response. However, significant challenges were encountered when trying to contract small and/or informal organizations with no bank account and limited understanding of English, such as the traditional organizations in Aceh (Panglima Laot, Keujruen Blang).

LoAs were found a generally inflexible document, requiring a high level of detail about the activities to be undertaken by partners at times when activities are not always clearly identified. Amendments to LoAs after contract signature resulted in substantial wrangling and consumed considerable time.

Lessons

Large-scale humanitarian programmes can be highly political. Using a combination of governmental and non-governmental partners is a good way to promote neutrality and transparency.

The LoA format imparts a rather bureaucratic dimension to partnerships, one in which FAO is merely subcontracting an activity to a service provider rather than partnering with a peer to share risks and benefits.

Under the current FAO procedural framework, CBOs, small cooperatives and traditional organizations are best contracted through the conduit of well-established, registered NGOs.

Recommendations	Responsible parties
27. As a way to speed up the implementation of initial projects in other crises, stand-by partnership agreements should be explored with interested INGOs, with the United Nations Joint Logistics Center to help develop FAO’s logistical capacity, and with WFP to subcontract some logistical functions (storage, transport).	TCE / OFAD
28. A new, simpler project document format should replace the LoA in most instances, with the legal fine print placed in annex and the objectives and implementation modalities upfront. The document should allow for donations in-kind only, display the contribution of the implementing partner(s), and emphasise the fact that it is a joint effort by FAO and one or several partner(s) rather than a mere sub-contracting relationship.	AFS / OFAD / TCE

10. Sectoral coordination

Conclusions

According to the context and experience of the Emergency Coordinator as well as the resources available, FAO played different coordinating roles in each of the four countries, with the most credible efforts witnessed in Sri Lanka and to a lesser extent Indonesia. In all cases, these efforts were limited to information sharing, advocacy, and trying to promote a more even geographic coverage and shared beneficiary lists in the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka.

Harmonizing the activities of hundreds of NGOs and charitable organisations, who all had their own donors and independent interventions, represented an insurmountable task. Whether NGOs should be better regulated other than voluntarily is also debatable since independence is one of their major strengths.

Lessons

The comparative advantage of specialised UN agencies in helping coordinate complex responses through sectoral, multi-stakeholder coordination forums bringing together state and non-state actors was illustrated once again in the tsunami response. If pursued during the entire response, well facilitated and truly participatory, these sectoral coordination forums may easily surpass the delivery of physical assistance in terms of visibility and usefulness.

However, coordination at the local level (district, region, etc.) is best promoted through to generalist, area-based forums under the chairmanship of decentralised governments and/or OCHA, in order to avoid a proliferation of local forums leading to “meeting fatigue”. Arguably, cross-sectoral, area-based coordination forums are best suited to the local level, while sectoral coordination is best positioned at the national level.

Overall, the FAO tsunami response was not sufficiently monitored, and this weakness contributed to a number of problems not being picked up soon enough, notably in Sri Lanka where the partner in charge of boat repairs was awarded the work without a competitive process and tended to operate in a non-transparent manner. In Indonesia, the agriculture programme did set up formal monitoring processes, requesting FAO implementing partners to produce progress reports and conduct post distribution surveys of beneficiary satisfaction and outcomes. These beneficiary surveys could have generated more useful findings, had they been entrusted to a group of professional surveyors. In Thailand, the programme’s outputs, beneficiaries and outcomes were closely monitored by way of frequent field visits by national and international consultants and good process documentation.

The RTE observed an encouraging trend toward tackling communication and visibility issues more and more vigorously. Various means were used to disseminate FAO’s messages and raise the visibility of its interventions: roadside boards, t-shirts and caps, national media, newsletters. However, the newsletters could have been better exploited and disseminated, and the visibility of the FAO tsunami response in international media remained minimal.

The tsunami atlases initially produced by SDRN and posted on the FAO tsunami Website constituted potentially useful products that should have been disseminated more widely at the country level and through UNHIC and ReliefWeb.

Lessons

Stronger monitoring processes would help the Organization manage its rehabilitation programmes and improve upon its reporting to donors by providing the required data on implementation progress and on outcomes at the beneficiaries’ level.

Requesting implementation partners to conduct beneficiary surveys entails loss of data quality (implementation partners often lack the expertise to collect and analyze such data) as well as a conflict of interest (implementing partners have little interest in reporting low beneficiary satisfaction rates).

Tight monitoring systems would be particularly desirable in cases where the choice of implementation partner is not entirely under the control of FAO but imposed by local circumstances.

Monitoring systems are certainly useful tools, but do not reduce the need for frequent field visits by project staff and consultants, which remain absolutely essential to identify issues or deepen the analysis of issues identified through other means, and adjust programmes in real time.

Recommendations	Responsible parties
31. TCE should develop standard monitoring processes by intervention type, involving a blend of tools such as: a) a simple reporting system for implementing partners; b) databases of beneficiaries’ names and location; c) regular beneficiary surveys contracted to teams of well-trained third-party enumerators; d) rudimentary mapping of programme areas and results; and e) frequent visits by staff and consultants to programme sites. These monitoring processes should be kept simple and be geared toward: a) verifying that FAO’s assistance is properly and efficiently channelled to ultimate beneficiaries; b) collating an overview of programme realisations; c) assessing outcomes (use and appreciation of outputs by beneficiaries); and d) facilitating information management and reporting to donors.	TCER / ERCUs
32. In future crises, FAO should provide mapping and remote sensing services over a longer period, with an emphasis on damage assessments at the onset of the response, moving on during the rehabilitation phase to basic agro-ecological zoning to support a closer fit between rehabilitation assistance and local livelihoods. This work needs to be conducted in partnership with UNHIC and FAO maps posted on ReliefWeb, so as to contribute to the collective effort of the UN system towards better GIS products in support of emergency programmes.	NRCE (ex-SDRN)

Annexes

Annex 1:

Terms of Reference for a

Real Time Evaluation of FAO Operations

in Response to the Tsunami Emergency

Background

The unprecedented emergency caused by the December 2004 Tsunami in South Asia provoked an equally unprecedented response from the International Community and the UN. As a first response, FAO committed US$ 1.5 million from its own limited resources to needs assessments and early recovery in Indonesia, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Thailand and mobilized 35 experts within one month.

Through the UN Flash Appeal, FAO appealed on 6 January for US$ 26.5 million for six countries – Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Seychelles, Somalia, and Sri Lanka – and for US$ 2.5 million for regional activities in partnership with UNDP and UNEP. As of 9 February, funds approved for FAO amount to US$ 31.1 million including US$ 12.5 million in cash received. Three donors - Germany, Norway, and United Kingdom - made commitments to FAO’s newly established Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities (SFERA). FAO’s assistance is focused on the agriculture and fisheries sectors; regarding the latter, the Group of 77 and the European Commissioner for Fisheries have called upon FAO to take the lead in coordinating rehabilitation of the fisheries sector in the region.

FAO’s intervention strategy follows a flexible, step-wise response:

· Needs and damage assessment in the agriculture and fisheries sectors;

· Short-term rehabilitation activities including input delivery (such as fishing gear, boat repair kits, replacement boats, irrigation pumps, soil salinity testing equipment, seeds, fertilizers, hand tractors tools, and other agricultural inputs) and repair contracts/casual labour (e.g. for rehabilitation of harbours, anchorages, fish storage and processing facilities, repair of irrigation and drainage infrastructure) and cash for work (land clearing, etc.);

· Technical assistance to facilitate coordination of the rehabilitation efforts and provide technical/strategic guidance

· Formulation of rehabilitation and recovery strategies and programmes;

By February 2005, FAO had fielded numerous missions to the region and had 70 international and regional experts deployed across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Thailand and Myanmar. These included fisheries specialists, agronomists, experts in salinity issues, in horticulture, irrigation and water management, and property rights.

Rationale for the RTE

The magnitude of the support mobilized calls for particular attention to ensure efficient and effective use of resources by FAO. More specifically, the reasons for a Real Time Evaluation (RTE) of FAO operations stem from the following considerations:

· The volume of funds involved and the diversity of sources require adequate disbursement, reporting and management procedures, as well as rapid and effective supervisory mechanisms;

· The size and complexity of operations in the seven affected countries call for responses tailored to local specific circumstances and needs, as the extent and depth of damage differ;

· A history of political conflict in some of the affected areas necessitates a politically sensitive approach;

· The wide range of partners and stakeholders intervening simultaneously in the same areas and sectors requires effective coordination mechanisms;

· The changing character of the intervention over time – initial high intensity of humanitarian operations followed by rehabilitation programmes, with a longer term perspective of reconstruction and development – highlight the need for adequate guidance and review for successful transition from relief/emergency to recovery/development; and last, but not least;

· The worldwide attention focused on the efficiency and transparency of UN operations call for timely feedback on the use of resources made available.

Purpose of the RTE

The RTE is to serve multiple purposes:

1. Provision of immediate feedback and guidance to FAO management on strategic and operational achievements (what works well) and constraints (what doesn’t work well) in order to improve impact, timeliness, coverage, appropriateness, sequencing and consistency of operations;

2. Promoting accountability to populations affected, Governments, donors and other stakeholders on the use of resources to reinforce participation, transparency, and communication;

3. Identification of gaps or unintended outcomes, with a view to improving the FAO strategy and programme’s approach, orientation, coherence and coordination; and

4. Drawing lessons on FAO’s capacity to respond timely and adequately to a sudden natural disaster and to support livelihood recovery and development efforts in the agriculture, fisheries and forestry sector.

Scope of the RTE

Generally, the RTE will provide ongoing and timely assessments of FAO’s Tsunami response vis-à-vis the Organization’s mandates as (i) UN lead agency for emergency response, recovery and development of the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors, and (ii) implementation agency entrusted by some donors with direct livelihood protection operations. In this context, the RTE will review processes such as strategic and operational programming, information flows, management issues (including disbursements and procurement arrangements), internal coordination as well as external coordination and support to transition planning, assess FAO’s advocacy work and partnerships[47], and analyse the Tsunami Relief Operations’ actual and potential impact.

Furthermore, in reviewing FAO’s operations, the RTE will consider recommendations made and lessons learned of recent evaluations carried out on emergency operations and will pay attention to the extent to which these recommendations and lessons have been taken into account in the planning, programming and management of the Tsunami related operations.

More specifically, the RTE will include assessments of the following:

· Accuracy and comprehensiveness of needs assessments and targeting;

· Relevance of Tsunami Relief operations to needs of the affected populations (including consideration of alternative approaches, such as cash transfers);

· Adequacy of (international and national) human and financial resources mobilized;

· Realism in the design and planning of operations;

· Efficiency of operations[48]: timeliness, cost-effectiveness (including consideration of outsourcing and delegation arrangements), internal coordination and backstopping mechanisms (including roles and responsibilities of FAO HQ and regional and national decentralized offices);

· Coordination and complementarities with all those involved in the provision of assistance in the agriculture and fisheries sector (including avoidance of duplication, and harmonization of approaches);

· Technical, social, economic and political soundness and feasibility of strategies, programmes and projects;

· Quantity and quality of inputs and services (including technical assistance) delivered, and outputs produced;

· Actual and potential effects and impact at three levels of beneficiaries/stakeholders[49]:

o Directly affected populations, including smallholders, artisanal fisher folk, as well as small agri-businesses in agriculture, forestry and fisheries (with specific attention to gender aspects and the conditions of most vulnerable groups);

o Service providers, including local and regional staff of line ministries, humanitarian, Non Governmental and Community Based Organizations, UN agencies, and other FAO partners;

o Decision-makers (national Governments, UN agencies, other humanitarian /NGO organizations, and donors).

Process and Methodology

FAO’s RTE is meant to be part of an international coordination effort for inter-sectoral, inter-agency evaluations of Tsunami assistance initiated by ALNAP and OCHA. The scope, the approach and the methodology of the RTE may be adjusted if opportunities for evaluation collaboration occur.

The RTE process will be participatory and iterative. Attention will be given to ensuring the ownership of its results by the main stakeholders (see section on reporting/information dissemination/RTE interface below) and to providing immediate feedback to FAO management and others on the on-going assistance. Openness, transparency and constructive criticism will be part of the process. Participatory in the context of the FAO RTE means that views, feedback and suggestions for improvement will be collected from the three groups of beneficiaries/stakeholders mentioned above. Staff’s views and feedback will be particularly important for the assessment of internal processes and for integrating the evaluation results into management processes. The evaluation questions and approaches to be used by the mission will be defined in more detail before the actual field work. Inputs from FAO colleagues, partners and stakeholders are expressly requested so as to guide the mission’s work, and make its approach more representative. It is expected that some issues raised in the ongoing TCE review/visioning process could also be considered as key questions for the RTE.

The RTE will be carried out over approximately a one year time-span and will consist of three stages to assess FAO’s role and response at different points in time: post-inception, mid-term, final. Each round will include a desk review, field visits to countries, in-country reporting and feedback mechanisms (such as reports, workshops, bulletins, and telephone conferences). The RTE will make use of a number of tools, including document analysis, interviews, field visits, SWOT analysis with stakeholders, focus groups discussion, beneficiaries impact assessment, etc. according to circumstances. For the beneficiary impact assessment, the RTE will commission national Beneficiary Assessment studies to feed into the evaluation. All stages of the RTE will include internal FAO briefing and debriefing sessions, as well as briefing and debriefing sessions with partners and decision makers at the national level.

Stage 1 of the RTE will have a dual purpose: it will be a scoping exercise for the RTE mission while at the same time providing timely and pertinent feedback to FAO management and main donors/partners and stakeholders. The focus will be on operational aspects of the emergency phase (bullet points 1 to 6 under Scope above), but also include an initial review of strategic initiatives developed for the post-emergency phase. An internal report covering the mission’s conclusions and recommendations will be prepared following the field work.

Stage 2 will have the following objectives: (i) to analyse strengths and weaknesses of FAO’s response, including management and coordination processes; (ii) to formulate – based on consultations with FAO colleagues and main stakeholders – operational as well as strategic recommendations, and (iii) to strengthen – through an extension of the consultative process, the ownership of findings and recommendations of the RTE. In addition to extensive FAO-internal briefing and debriefing sessions, a regional partner workshop will be organized. An interim report for wider circulation will be prepared following the workshop.

Stage 3 will consolidate the RTE findings and recommendations, and concentrate on the lessons learned as well as the assessment of outputs, effects and impact. Also stage 3 will feature a regional workshop; in addition, a final report will be prepared to include lessons learned on FAO’s efficiency and effectiveness in its response to the emergency and on its role and capacity as leading agency in the coordination of the agriculture fisheries and forestry sectors. Provision will also be made for internal and external feedback on the RTE process and methodology and for the formulation of suggestions for future RTEs.

RTE stages 2 and 3 will pay specific attention to the implementation of agreed recommendations and adjustments made. At the end of each stage (and if needed, also in between), the issues to be addressed by the RTE at the next stage will be revisited, and if necessary adjusted and fine-tuned to allow for an adequate response to changed circumstances and to address eventual requests for information received from stakeholders[50].

Team Composition

The RTE team[51] will be composed of:

· One PBEE (Evaluation Service) staff member who will particularly focus on institutional and learning aspects of the evaluation and will ensure continuity over the evaluation period;

· One international consultant with experience in emergency and rehabilitation operations with a good knowledge of FAO;

· One international consultant with experience in fisheries;

· One rural livelihoods and gender officer (TCEO - Emergency Operation Services, Sri Lanka) who will particularly look at the integration of gender considerations into project implementation, and beneficiary analysis; and

· National consultants[52] (one in each country) recruited in Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, appointed if possible in agreement with the respective governments.

Reporting, information dissemination, and interface with stakeholders

The RTE will deal with four categories of stakeholders: (1) the directly affected populations, (2) regional and local service providers/partners, (3) decision-makers and partners at national and regional level (national Governments, UN agencies, other humanitarian/NGO organizations, donors) and (4) FAO management and staff (field, regional and HQ staff).

The mission itself will be able to provide only limited feedback to the directly affected populations: to the extent possible, the mission’s field visits will be organized in such a way as to provide the maximum interface with affected populations and their representatives. (The beneficiary assessment missions are expected to complement this effort.) Regional and local service providers are expected to give and receive feedback during briefing and debriefing sessions with the mission, and again through interaction with the beneficiary assessment team. Decision-makers at the national and regional level (national Governments, UN agencies, other humanitarian/NGO organizations, and donors) will be met at briefing and debriefing sessions, and will also be invited to the workshops supported by the RTE.

Within FAO, the mission will interact with staff and management in FAO HQ and regional and national decentralized offices. (An eventual link to the high-level Tsunami Committee still needs to be decided) Within FAO HQ, the Technical Departments concerned (AG, FI and FO) as well as TC Department are expected to nominate members (departmental focal points, or specific nominees) for an RTE Committee to review and guide the process.

Governments (in all affected countries) will be invited to nominate focal points to interact with the RTE.

It is suggested that the RTE be given some flexibility concerning information products prepared by the mission. The choice of information products and channels of communication will depend on the intended audiences. Careful attention will be paid to distinguish between internal working documents intended for FAO, and those reports, bulletins, presentations etc. produced for a wider audience. For information products in the latter category, it is suggested to allow for their circulation in the public domain (accompanied by an appropriate disclaimer). At the end of each mission, there will be a report submitted to FAO Higher Management (proposed circulation: addressed to Director of TCE, with copies to ADG, TC, FAORs concerned, ADG, RAP, and Focal Points in Technical Departments).

The interim report (at the end of Stage 2) as well as the final report (end of Stage 3) will be circulated to a wider audience, including the Inter-agency and Donor Evaluation Coalition.

Timetable and Itinerary

Three missions, with durations of up to five weeks, will take place in three countries: Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Indonesia and Sri Lanka have been selected for the volume of operations involved and Bangkok for being a regional hub (but also field operations will be reviewed). The first mission will take place in May 2005. A field visit to Maldives is envisaged in order to assess the situation in one of the small island states affected.

Further details regarding the dates of country visits will follow as soon as the mission composition has been confirmed, and logistical arrangements clarified.

Annex 2: Itineraries

First mission:

Sun 15 May 05	Travel to Bangkok
Mon 16 May	Meetings with RAP in Bangkok, travel to Jakarta
Tue 17 May	Meeting with FAO Representation in Jakarta
Wed 18 May	Meetings with various ministries and partners in Jakarta
Thu 19 May	Meeting in the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, Jakarta
Fri 20 May	Meetings with BAKORNAS and UN agencies in Jakarta
Sat 21 May	Travel to Banda Aceh, meetings with ERCU
Sun 22 May	Document review
Mon 23 - Wed 25 May	Meetings with partners in Banda Aceh
Thu 26 May	Meetings with ERCU
Fri 27 May	Debriefing with ERCU, BRR
Sat 28 May	Travel to Bangkok
Sun 29 May	Document review, note writing
Mon 30 May	Meetings with RAP, UN and government partners in Bangkok
Tue 31 May	Travel to Phuket, meetings with Vice Governor, MOAC and FAO consultants
Wed 01 Jun	Travel to Phang-Nga, meeting with Vice Governor and MOAC
Thu 02 Jun	Phuket - Bangkok
Fri 03 Jun	Meetings with partners in Bangkok, travel to Colombo
Sat 04 Jun	Meetings with ERCU in Colombo, travel to Hambantota
Sun 05 Jun	Field visit in Hambantota, travel back to Colombo
Mon 06 Jun	Meetings with FAOR, ERCU and partners in Colombo
Tue 07 Jun	Meetings with ERCU and partners in Colombo
Wed 08 Jun	Travel to the Northeast Province, meetings with partners in Trincomalee
Thu 09 Jun	Field visit in Northeast Province, travel back to Colombo
Fri 10 Jun	Debriefing with FAO and MFAR
Sat 11 Jun	Travel to Bangkok
Sun 12 Jun	Preparation of debriefing with RAP
Mon 13 Jun	Debriefing with RAP
Tue 14 Jun	Return travel
Mon 11 July 05	Debriefing at headquarters and with RAP by video-conference

Second mission:

Sun 30 Oct 05	Travel to Bangkok
Mon 31 Oct	FAO RAP Office briefing, meeting with Beneficiary Assessment team in Thailand
Tue 01 Nov	Bangkok, meeting with government and partner institutions
Wed 02 Nov	Flight Bangkok - Phuket in the morning, field visits in Phang Nga
Thu 03 Nov	Field visits in Phuket
Fri 04 Nov	Field visits in Krabi and Trang
Sat 05 Nov	Field visits in Satun, return to Bangkok
Sun 06 Nov	Flight Bangkok - Colombo
Mon 07 Nov	Colombo, meetings with FAO Rep, ERCU, government and partners
Tue 08 Nov	Meeting with partners and Sri Lanka Beneficiary Assessment team
Wed 09 Nov	Field visits, Kalutara
Thu 10 Nov	Field visits, Galle
Fri 11 Nov	Field visits in Tangalle, meeting with the FAO Tangalle Office
Sat 12 Nov	Field visits (Dondra, Dikwella, Weligama)
Sun 13 Nov	Travel back to Colombo
Mon 14 Nov	Meetings with partner institutions, government and donors in Colombo
Tue 15 Nov	Debriefing with FAO / ERCU in Colombo
Wed 16 Nov	Flight Colombo - Bangkok - Jakarta
Thu 17 Nov	Jakarta, meeting with FAO Rep, government, UN orgs.
Fri 18 Nov	Flight Jakarta - Banda Aceh
Sat 19 - Sun 20 Nov	Meeting with ERCU office and partner institutions in Banda Aceh
Mon 21 Nov	Meeting with Beneficiary Assessment team
Tue 22 - Wed 23 Nov	More meeting in Banda Aceh; attendance in FAO Agriculture Consolidation Workshop and GTZ Coastal Management Workshop.
Thu 24 Nov	Meetings in Banda Aceh
Fri 25 Nov	Field trip on North-East Coast: Pidie - Panta Raja
Sat 26 Nov	Field trip on North-East Coast: Bireuen
Sun 27 Nov	Drive back to Banda Aceh
Mon 28 - Tue 29 Nov	Meetings in Banda Aceh
Wed 30 Nov	Debriefing with FAO Banda Aceh, leave for Jakarta
Thu 01 Dec	Debriefing with FAO Rep, meeting with JICA and Japan Embassy
Fri 02 Dec	Report writing
Sat 03 Dec	Flight Jakarta - Bangkok
Sun 04 Dec	Return travel
Wed 14 Dec 05	Debriefing at headquarters and with RAP by video-conference

Third mission:

Wed 31 May 06	Arrival in Colombo
Thu 1 Jun	Meetings with FAOR, ERCU and partners in Colombo
Fri 2 Jun	Field visits: Galle
Sat 3 Jun	Field visits: Matara
Sun 4 – Mon 5 Jun	Field visit: Tangalle
Wed 7 Jun	Travel Back to Colombo
Thu 8 Jun	Workshop in Colombo
Fri 9 Jun	Debriefing in Colombo and travel to Malé
Sat 10 Jun	Malé
Sun 11 Jun	Laamu
Mon 12 Jun	Meemu
Tue 13 Jun	North
Wed 14 Jun	North - back to Malé
Thu 15 Jun	Workshop in Malé
Fri 16 Jun	Debriefing in Malé
Sat 17 Jun	Fly back to Rome
Fri 23 Jun	Partial debriefing in headquarters
Sun 9 Jul	Departure for Thailand
Mon 10 Jul	Bangkok
Tue 11 Jul	Bangkok
Wed 12 Jul	Field (Phang Na, Phuket, Krabi etc.)
Thu 13 Jul	Field
Fri 14 Jul	Field (workshop?)
Sat 15 Jul	Field
Sun 16 Jul	Field, back to Bangkok
Mon 17 Jul	Debriefing in Bangkok
Tue 18 Jul	Fly to Indonesia
Wed 19 Jul	Jakarta
Thu 20 Jul	Fly to Banda Aceh
Fri 21 Jul	Banda Aceh
Sat 22 Jul	Banda Aceh
Sun 23 Jul	Banda Aceh
Mon 24 Jul	Meulaboh - West coast
Tue 25 Jul	Meulaboh - West coast
Wed 26 Jul	Meulaboh - West coast (workshop?)
Thu 27 Jul	Meulaboh - back to BA (through Medan?)
Fri 28 Jul	Return to Banda Aceh
Sat 29 Jul	Boat yards in East coast or near BA
Sun 30 Jul	Workshop preparation
Mon 31 Jul	Workshop in BA
Tue 1 Aug	Debriefing in BA - fly to Jakarta
Wed 2 Aug	Debriefing in Jakarta - fly to Bangkok
Thu 3 Aug	Debriefing with Regional Office - Fly back
Fri 4 Aug	Return travel
Fri 11 Aug	Debriefing in headquarters

Annex 3: Persons Met

FAO Rome:

Anne Bauer Director TCE

Fernanda Guerrieri Chief TCEO

Cristina Amaral Senior Operations Officer TCEO

Mariano Gosi Agronomist TCEO

Alexander Jones Tsunami Operations Coordinator TCEO

Andrew Sobey Administration Officer TCEO

Victoria Sun Operations Officer TCEO

Sanna Lisa Taivalmaa Development Economist TCEO

Laura Jane Tiberi Operations Officer TCEO

Mirela Hasibra Operations Officer TCEO

Sylvie Wabbes-Candotti Agronomist TCEO

Richard China Senior Economist TCER

Patrick Jacqueson Programme Officer TCER

Erminio Sacco Emergency and Transition Strategy Officer TCER

Regina Gambino Procurement Strategy & Monitoring Officer AFSP

Catherine Meier Special Legal Adviser AFSP

David Baugh Senior Finance Officer AFFC

Pedro Andreo Andreo Internal Auditor AUD

Daniel Renault Senior Officer - Irrigation System AGLW

Florence Egal Nutrition Officer ESNP

Lahsen Ababouch Chief FIIU

Jeremy Turner Chief FIIT

Lena Westlund Fisheries Consultant FIIT

Marc Nolting Fish Farming and Aquaculture Consultant FIIT

Dominique Greboval Senior Fishery Planning Officer FIPP

Rolf Willmann Senior Fishery Planning Officer FIPP

Nick Parsons Director GIID

Marta Bruno Rural Socio-Economist SDAR

Beneviève Dionne Anthropologist ESWD

Dalia Mattioni Food and Nutrition Economist TCID

Thailand:

Royal Government of Thailand:

Waraporn Prompoj Chief, International Coop. Group, Fisheries Dprt - MOA

Duanghathai Danviwat National FAO Committee, MOAC

Kanok Katikarn Inspector General, MOAC

Chamaiporn Tanomsridejchai Foreign Relations Officer, DOAE/MOAC

Atchara Somsuay Plan and Policy Analyst, DOAE/MOAC

Thongarg Dhandang Plan and Policy Analyst, DOAE/MOAC

Kasem Prasutsangehan Plan and Policy Analyst, FARD/MOAC

Nuttharon Kaewwichit Director, Phang Nga Provincial MOAC

Sueksa Malakanchana Director, Phang Nga Provincial MOAC

Raweewan Yinguansiri Chief of Livestock Office, Phang Nga Provincial MOAC

Suwannee Srinak Livestock Officer, Phang Nga Provincial MOAC

Apichat Kanjanaopas Chief of Extension Office, Phang Nga Provincial MOAC

Kasem Phatsung Extension Officer, Phang Nga Provincial MOAC

Apichart Khanom Assistant Director, Satun Provincial MOAC

Charoen Omanee Dprt of Fisheries, Satun Provincial MOAC

Thanastanee Sawatdirak Director, Phuket Provincial MOAC

Sompong Pean Tong Phuket Provincial MOAC

Supakit Indopala Phuket Provincial MOAC

Issara Bujayarut Phuket Provincial MOAC

Manoch Charungkettikajon Tai Muang Learning Center – DOAE/MOAC

Augchara Nopparat Tai Muang Learning Center – DOAE/MOAC

Sakarind Tunsakul Tai Muang Learning Center – DOAE/MOAC

Piyaporn Natrug Tai Muang Learning Center – DOAE/MOAC

Thapacha Tavaroj Tai Muang Learning Center – DOAE/MOAC

Taluengsak Junechum Tai Muang Learning Center – DOAE/MOAC

Jarupa Rodtook Tai Muang Learning Center – DOAE/MOAC

Sontaya Junetayong Tai Muang Learning Center – DOAE/MOAC

FAO RAP Office:

He Changchui Assistant Director General/Regional Representative

Hiroyuki Konuma Deputy Regional Representative

Yuji Niino Land Management Officer

Hiroshi Hiraoka Soil Fertility Officer

Suzan Braatz Senior Forestry Officer

Patrick B. Durst Senior Forestry Officer

Miyuki Ishikawa APO Forest Economics and Policy

Masakazu Kashio Forest Resources Officer

David Dawe Senior Food Systems Economist

David Brown Senior Food System Economist

Derek Staples Senior Fishery Officer

Thierry Facon Senior Water Management Officer

Simon Funge-Smith Aquaculture Officer

Peter Ooi Regional Coordinator, Ag. Recovery and Emergency

Yuji Niino Land Management Officer

Buddy Hla Chief, MSU

Hideko Tsuji Programme Officer (Thai Affairs Section)

Kayo Torii Programme Officer (Thai Affairs Section)

Tienpati Supajii Assistant (Thai Affairs Section)

Shunji Sugiyama Information and Liaison Officer

Alastair Hicks Senior Agro-Industry and Post Harvest Officer

Ralph Houtman Marketing and Rural Finance Officer

David Hitchcock Senior Farming Systems Development Officer

Hans Gerhard Wagner Senior Animal Production and Health Officer

Anton Bontje RAPX

Wim Polman Rural Development Officer

Kim Kimpara

FAO National Consultants:

Kungwan Juntarashote National Consultant – Fisheries; Director of the Coastal Development Center, Kasetsart University

Apinan Kamnalrut National Consultant – Agriculture

Sakul Supongpan National Consultant – Fisheries

Praphas Weerapat Lead National Consultant

Other Partners:

Joana Merlin-Scholtes UN Resident Coordinator/UNDP Resident Representative

Håkan Björkman Deputy Resident Representative, UNDP

David Hollister Disaster recovery Advisor, UNDP

Barbara Orlandini Manager, Inter Agency Support Unit

Markus Werne Regional Humanitarian Affairs Officer - OCHA

Pete Bueno Director General, NACA

Hassanai Kongkeo Special Adviser, NACA

Yves Henocque Co-Director, CHARM

Sanchai Tandavanitj Co-Director, CHARM

David Thomson Fisheries Advisor, CHARM

Tanu Nabnian Save the Andaman Network/CHARM

Parkpoom Witantiratiwat Save the Andaman Network/Federation of Southern Fisherfolks

Jonqrak Save the Andaman Network/Federation of Southern Fisherfolks

Worawit Wanchana Project Assistant - SEAFDEC

Supaporn Anuchiracheeva Fisheries Management Specialist - SEAFDEC

Theo Ebbero Coastal Resources Management Advisor - SEAFDEC

Mr. Nazri Ishak Fisheries Specialist (Malaysia) - SEAFDEC

Win Myint Maung Fisheries Specialist (Myanmar) - SEAFDEC

Tanu Naebnian WWF

Sri Lanka:

Government of Sri Lanka:

L.K. Hathurusinghe Director/Projects, Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock

G. Piyasena Director, Dprt of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, Ministry of Fisheries

H.S.G. Fernando Director, Dprt of Ocean Resources, Ministry of Fisheries

Indhra Kaushal Rajapaksa Director, Livelihoods Dprt, TAFREN

Bandula Abeygunawardena Finance Manager, Cey-Nor Foundation Ltd

Ratnatilaka Assistant Director, Fisheries Dprt, Kalutara District

A. Hettiarachchi Director General (Development) - MFAR

Domingo George Assistant Director - DFAR, Kalmunai District

B. Mahadeva Agriculture and Fisheries Office, Batticaloa District

S. Ganachandren Provincial Director of Agriculture, Trincomalee District

Galappathi Junior Minister Fisheries (ret.), Tangalle

FAO:

Pote Chumsri FAO Representative

Premalal Kuruppuarachchi Assistant FAO Representative (Programme)

Mona Chaya Emergency and Rehabilitation Coordinator - Tsunami

Serge Tissot Emergency Programme Officer

Giuseppe Simeon Emergency Programme Officer

Giuseppe de Bac Horticulture Expert

Claude Fernando Fisheries Consultant

Leslie Joseph Fisheries Development and Management Consultant

Kamalsiri Nissanga Boat Repair Programme Coordinator

Raymond Patrick Marine Engineer

R.R.D. Warnadasa Marine Engineer

M Mahadeva Marine Engineer

Germain Pajot Fishing Gear Consultant

Cyril Binduhewa Fishing Gear Specialist

Sydney Jayawardene Fishing Gear Assistant

Samithamby Ramachandran National Consultant - Fishing Gear

Samantha Rathnayake Programme Assistant

Chamila Livera District Officer, Galle

Nuwan De Silva Assistant District Officer, Galle

Saverio Frazzoli Area Coordinator, Tangalle Office

Veronica Grazioli Volunteer from Italian Protezione Civile, Tangalle Office

H.R.C. Fernando National Project Officer, Tangalle Office

Sarath Amarasekera Deputy National Project Officer, Tangalle Office

H.A.B. Rodrigo District Officer, Tangalle Office

James Breene Agriculture Consultant

Lars Engvall Fisheries Sector Advisor

James Terjanian Reporting and Information Officer

Peiris Sugathapala Senior Administrative Assistant

Other Partners:

Jeff Taft-Dicks Representative and Country Director - WFP

Jean-Yves Lequime Head of Field Operations - WFP

Valentin Gatzinski Head of Office - OCHA

Lalith Kiriella Assistant Field Security Coordination Officer - UN

Gabriela Elroy Head of Trincomalee Zone Office - UNICEF

Paolo Bononi Office Coordinator, Italian Cooperation

Roland Steurer Director, GTZ

Peter Seibert Consultant, GTZ

Kristin Lunden Second Secretary - Norwegian Embassy

Erik Brede Counsellor, Norwegian Embassy

Vidya Perera Senior Advisor, Norwegian Embassy

Kirsten Björu Senior Fisheries Advisor - NORAD

Gunnar Album Tsunami Rehabilitation Project, Coastal Campaign/A.J. Fishing

Christin Lidzba Program Manager, CBM (German NGO)

Tan Eng Guan Fishery Facilities Development Advisor - JICA

Indonesia:

Government of Indonesia:

Mappaona Director, Bureau of Planning, MoA

Pamela Fadhilah Head of Planning Resources, Bureau of Planning, MoA

Emilia Harahap Director - Bureau of International Cooperation, MoA

Djoko Supono Technical Support - Bureau of International Cooperation, MoA

Farid Hasan B. Head of Division - Bureau of International Cooperation, MoA

Saut P. Hutagalung Director - Planning and Int’l Cooperation Bureau, MFAR

Mian Sahala Sitanggang Public Awareness (FAO Focal Point), MFAR

Hadimulyo Public Affairs and Institutional Relations, MFAR

Dedy H. Sutisna Director - Fishing Facilities, MFAR

Soen’an H. Poernomo Secretary - Center of Fisheries Education and Training, MFAR

Ida Kusuma Planning Division - Coasts and Small Islands, MFAR

Iskandar Deputy - Department of Economic and Business Empowerment, BRR NAD-Nias

Zainul Arifin Panglima Polem Head, Food Crops and Horticulture Dinas, NAD

T. Thurmizi Deputy Head - Provincial Agriculture Office, NAD

Iskandar Ahmad Head, Dinas Kelautan dan Perikanan, NAD

Fadhli Usman Reporting Officer, Dinas Pertanian in Jenieb, Pidie

Rafiani M. Yusuf Community Empowerment Officer, Camat Office in Jenieb, Pidie

Moch Ikhwanuddin Mawardi Aceh Secretariat - Bappenas (National Development Planning Agency)

Endah Murniningtyas Director - Directorate of Food and Agriculture, Bapenas

Risman Musa Deputy for Coordination of Religion - Culture and Tourism (Barkonas)

Rasyidi Hasyim Deputy Head - Meulaboh District Fisheries Office

Ulul Izmi Division Head - Food Crop Section, Meulaboh District Agriculture Office

Ruzman Salam Head - Horticulture Section, Meulaboh District Agriculture Office

FAO:

Man Ho So FAO Representative

Rudolf Ziesler Officer-in-Charge

Benni Sormin Assistant FAO Representative

Shin Imai Regional SPFS Coordinator

Malene Arboe-Rasmussen Information and Communication Officer

Nicholas MB Hughes Administrator, FAO Office Banda Aceh

Jean-Jacques Franc de Ferriere Area Coordinator

Ulrich Schmidt Chief Technical Officer - Fisheries

Bart Dominicus Emergency Coordinator

Christophe Charbon Agronomist

Henry Franks Senior Technical Advisor for BRR

Peter Flewwelling Chief Technical Officer - Fisheries

Michael Savins Master Boat Builder

Michael Phillips Aquaculture Specialist

Arun Padiyar Consultant – Aquaculture

Yudha Fahrimal Consultant – Livestock

Rajendra Aryal Agronomist (later Emergency Coordinator)

Alfizar Agronomist

Akmal Syukri National Consultant – Fisheries

Mulia Nurhasan Consultant – Small Scale Fish Processing

Angus Graham Programme Officer

Priya Gujadhur Reporting and Information Officer

Erkan Ozcelik Operation Officer

Ronald Dijk Land and Water Management Specialist (Meulaboh Office)

John Stevens Consultant – Agriculture

George Kuru Consultant – Forestry

Hasan Yudie Sastra Consultant – Agriculture Machinery

Timothy Nolan Liaison Officer

Philippe Leperre Livestock Adviser

David James Post Harvest and Fisheries Adviser

Susan Siar Fishery Industry Officer

Other Partners:

Reyko Niimi Deputy Resident Coordinator, UNORC-Jakarta

Enayet Madani Deputy Head of Office, UNORC-Banda Aceh

Samsudin Berlian Information and Advocacy Officer, UNORC

Simon Field Team Leader (Livelihoods), UNDP

Lyndal Meehan Coordinator, Livelihoods Network, UNDP

Patrick Sweeting Head - Crisis Prevention and Recovery Unit, UNDP

Mohamed Saleheen Country Director - WFP

Regis Chapman Programme Officer - WFP

Robert Ashe Regional Representative - UNHCR

Alia Nankoe Programme Officer - UNFPA

Oliver Lacey-Hall Deputy to Chief - OCHA

Beatrice Walker OCHA Meulaboh

Trine Lynggard OCHA Meulaboh

Philippe Borel Regional Chief - Tsunami Relief Operation, UN Joint Logistics Centre

Chan Jwee Kah Chief - UNJLC

Elizabeth Petrovski Information Manager - UNJLC

Jens Grimm Operations Coordinator - UNJLC

Michael J.C. Whiting UNJLC

Savita Area Security Coordinator - UN

Cheikh Dia Technical advisor to BRR, French Cooperation

Robert Rice Economic Revitalization Officer, BRR

H.T. Bustama Chairman, Panglima Laot organization

Adli Abdullah General Secretary, Panglima Laot

Montaki Finance Officer, Panglima Laot

Dafitzal Secretary, Lhok Kuala Panglima Laot

Dewan Anshari Chief, Bintany Kejora Cooperative

Aurélia Balpe Livelihoods Coordinator, Internat. Federation of the Red Cross

Bernd Weidlich First Secretary - German Embassy Liaison Office

Mr. Eckart Tardeck Head of Administration - German Embassy Liaison Office

Günther Kohl Project Leader, GTZ

Hendri Regional Project Manager, GTZ

Barbara Jung Social Development, GTZ

Fahmiwti Coordinator Banda Aceh, GTZ

Hitoshi Oikawa First Secretary – Agriculture, Japan Embassy

Keiichi Kato Resident representative, JICA

Dinur Krismasari Program Officer, JICA

Dominique de Juriew Food Security Coordinator, ACF

Patrick Cherubini Consultant – Fisheries, Triangle

Joseph Kearsley Boatbuilding Adviser - Triangle

Pierre Gildas Fleury Fisheries Programme Manager, ACTED

Chaidir Abdurrahman Project Coordinator for Aceh, OISCA

Fauzan Misri Assistant Coordinator, Aceh Province, OISCA

Zamah Syari Ali Coordinator, Aceh Utara district, OISCA

Sarbini Abdullah Coordinator, Bireuen district, OISCA

Giuseppe Busolacci Gruppo di Volontario Civile

Flavia Pugliese Gruppo di Volontario Civile

Cathy McWilliam Project Officer, Legal, IDLO

Lesley Adams Research Ass., Tsunami Cash Learning Project, ODI

Martin Foth Programme Officer, Coastal Management, InWEnt

Shekhar Anand Livelihoods Advisor, Oxfam

Eric G. Karlzen Economic Recovery Manager, World Vision

Johan Kieft ACD Strategy & Programme Development, CARE International

Marthen Malo Operations Manager, CARE International

Grégoire Poisson CARE International

Mark van den Berg Development Advisor - Aceh Care Foundation

Jes Putra Executive Director - Aceh Care Foundation

Sasha Muench Financial Access Program Manager, Mercy Corps

Irwansyah Director - Regional Development Foundation YPK

Damairia Pakpahan Gender Programme Officer - Oxfam

Annex 4: Main Consulted Documents

Global/regional:

Adams, Lesley: Cash-Based Transfers and Alternatives in Tsunami Recovery, in: Humanitarian Exchange, Number 32, December 2005

Arbuckle, Michael: Mission Report, Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka 20 November - 8 December 2005, FAO, 2005.

Becker, Bob and Schmidtke, Paul: FAO Emergency Response Management Capacity Development Workshop, Final Report, FAO, March 2006

Bourne, Willie: Inception / Progress Report, Regional Information Management and Co-Ordination on Strategies for Early Recovery of Agriculture in Coastal Regions in Indonesia, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand by Tsunami, FAO, April 2006

Clinton, William J.: Key Propositions for Building Back Better, Office of the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, UN, 2006

Development Initiatives: The International Community's Funding of the Tsunami Emergency and Fletcher, Tony: Emergency Programme Administrative Task Force - Final Report, FAO, Rome, August 2006

FAO/APRACA: Workshop on Designing Effective Disaster-Related Rural Finance Strategies, Asia Pacific Rural and Agricultural Credit Association, Bangkok, March 2005

FAO: 20 Things to Know about the Impact of Salt Water on Agricultural Land in Aceh Province, Field Guide on Salinity in Aceh-Draft publication RAP 05/, FAO, March 2005

FAO: Coordinating and Technical Support Unit to Tsunami Rehabilitation and Reconstruction in Fisheries and Aquaculture (CTSU), FAO-FID, April 2006

FAO: FAO Emergency Response System, June 2006

FAO: FAO's Role and Effectiveness in Emergencies, Workshop Handbook, January 2007

FAO: Interim Report, Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities, FAO, 2005

FAO: OSRO/GLO/502/FIN - Forestry Programme for Early Rehabilitation in Asian Tsunami Affected Countries, Inception and Progress Report, April 2006

FAO: Plan of Action for Emergency and Rehabilitation Assistance, June 2006

FAO: Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific - Briefing Paper on RAP Activities and Achievements in Support of the FAO Tsunami Response, Briefing for the Tsunami Real Time Evaluation, July 2006

FAO: Regional Workshop, One Year Later - The rehabilitation of Fisheries and Aquaculture in Coastal Communities of Tsunami Affected Countries in Asia, Bangkok, FAO-RAP, 2006

FAO: Regional Workshop, Rehabilitation of Fisheries and Aquaculture in Tsunami Affected Countries in Asia, Bangkok, FAO-RAP 2006

FAO: Report of the Regional Workshop on Salt Affected Soil from Sea Water Intrusion: Strategies for Rehabilitation and Management, RAP Publication, Bangkok 2005

FAO: Summary of Soil Salinity Survey on Tsunami Affected Area in Birueun and Aceh Utara (One Year Aftermath), FAO, December 2005

FAO: Tsunami Emergency and Rehabilitation Programme, FAO-TCE, August 2005

Gotthainer, Michael: Accounting for SFERA, June 2006

IFAD: Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami, Proposed IFAD Response in Asia, IFAD, December 2004

Keerthisinghe, Gamini: Back-to-Office Report, OSRO/GLO/503/NOR, Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, FAO, August 2005

Oxby, Clare: ARC-FAO Joint Inception Mission Assistance to Tsunami Affected Fishers and Communities in Sri lank and Indonesia, FAO, October 2005

Pauwels, Rudy: End of Assignment Report, FAO, October 2005

Renault, Daniel: Back to Office Report, FAO, April 2005

Tsunami Evaluation Coalition:

Bennett, Jon with Bertrand, William; Harkin, Clare; Stanley, Samarasinghe; Wickramatillake, Hemantha: Coordination of International Humanitarian Assistance in Tsunami-Affected Countries, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, July 2006

Christoplos, Ian: Links between Relief Rehabilitation and Development in the Tsunami Response, A Synthesis of Initial Findings, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, July 2006

De Ville de Goyet, Claude and Morinière, Lezlie: The Role of Needs Assessment in the Tsunami Response, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, July 2006

Flint, Michael and Goyder, High, Funding the Tsunami Response, A Synthesis of Findings, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, July 2006

Telford, John and Cosgrave, John: Joint Evaluation of the International Response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami: Synthesis Report, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, July 2006

Lopriore, Cristina: Desk Review on Needs Assessments in Food Security / Food Aid, FAO, December 2005

Scheoer, Elisabeth; Parakrama, Arjuna; Patel, Smruti with Vaux, Tony: Impact of the Tsunami Response on Local and National Capacities, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, July 2006

UNOCHA: Mid Term Review of the Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami Flash Appeal, UN 2005

Vaux, Tony et al.: Independent Evaluation of the DEC Tsunami Crisis Response, Valid International, November 2005

Indonesia:

Acheh-Eye.Org: Aceh "Sea Comanders" Now High-Profile, 2005

ADB, Presentation to the Agricultural Workshop, ADB, Banda Aceh, November 2005

ADB: Earthquake & Tsunami Emergency Support Project (ETESP), Data Assessment & Soil Reclamation, Agriculture Sector of ETESP, Annual Report 2005

Amaral, Cristina: Back to Office Report, Mission to Indonesia / Banda Aceh / Meulaboh and Medan, 17 May to 27 May 2005, FAO, 2005

Appanah, Simmathiri: Mission Report, Assessment of Forestry-Related Requirements for Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Tsunami-Affected Areas if Sri Lanka, FAO, March 2005

Arya, Rajendra, Stevens, E. John and Alfizar: Back the Office Report, FAO, November 2005

Aryal, Rajendra, and Sastra, Hasan Yudie: Mission Report, Banda Aceh, FAO, December 2005

BRR: Aceh Nias, Aceh and Nias One Year After the Tsunami, The Recovery Effort and Way Forward, BRR, December 2005

BRR: Laying down the Foundation for a Better Future, BRR, October 2005

BRR: Multi-Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias, BRR Strategy Paper 2006-09, BRR, January 2006

BRR: Strategy Paper for the Multi-Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias, January 2006

Charbon, Christophe: End of Assignment Report, Banda Aceh, Indonesia, FAO, October 2005

Dijk, Ronald: End of Mission Report, 20 January - 10 May 2005, Indonesia, Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, FAO May 2005

Dinas Pertanian Aceh Besar: Final Report, Hand Tractor UN-FAO Assistance, 2006

Dinas Pertanian Aceh Besar: Post Distribution Report, Hand Tractor UN-FAO Assistance, 2006

FAO/MMAF/ACIAR: Training Workshop on "Aquaculture Farm Rehabilitation in Aceh", LOKA Ujung Batee, FAO, Department Kelautan Dan Perikanan, Australian Government, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, 13 September 2005

FAO: Agricultural Revitalization and Farmer Empowerment Project (ARFEP), A Project Proposal for Post Tsunami Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Agriculture Prepared for the Government of Indonesia, FAO-TCI, January 2006

FAO: Agricultural Sector Framework for Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of the Tsunami Affected Areas of Aceh and North Sumatra Areas of Aceh and North Sumatra, Indonesia, Preparatory Document for Workshop on Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Province of Aceh, Ministry of Agriculture, Republic of Indonesia, March 2005

FAO: AUD 406, TCE-Indonesia: Tsunami Emergency and Rehabilitation Operation, FAO-Office of the Inspector General, March 2006

FAO: Guidelines for Timber Classification and Usage in Post-Tsunami Reconstruction, Draft Discussion Documents, July 2005

FAO: Newsletter, Rebuilding Livelihoods, Tsunami Response in Indonesia, March 2006

FAO: Newsletter, Tsunami Emergency Response in Indonesia, June 2005

FAO: Newsletter, Tsunami Emergency Response in Indonesia, September 2005

FAO: Notes on Good Practice for the Construction of Traditional Wooden Fishing Vessels, FAO Banda Aceh Fisheries Team, 2006

FAO: Progress, Rehabilitation Strategy and Work Plan for Tsunami Affected Areas of Nias and Nangroe Aceh Darussalam, Draft, Indonesia, August 2005

FAO: Strategy and Program for Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of the Fishery Sector in Aceh and Nias, Post Earthquake and Tsunami Wave Disaster, Draft Consultation Document, February 2006

FAO: Summary of the Fisheries Sector Coordinating Workshop, September 2005

FAO: Sustainable Aquaculture Rehabilitation in Aceh Province - An FAO/DOF/NACA Workshop, Banda Aceh, August 2005

FAO: Waves of Hope, Report of the regional Coordination workshop on rehabilitation of tsunami-affected forest ecosystems: strategies and new directions, FAO-RAP, 2005

Ferrara, L: Back to Office Report, Emergency Procurement Mission in Indonesia, FAO, May 2005

Flewwelling, Peter: End Mission Report, Tsunami Recovery Mission, FAO, May 2005

Gallene, Jean: Tsunami Reconstruction, Fisheries Tsunami Emergency Programme - Indonesia, Assessment of the fisheries sub-sector after the earthquake of 28th March 20055 in Nias and South Nias Districts, FAO, June 2005

Hiraoka, Hiroshi and Dijk, Ronald: Rapid appraisal of damage in the agricultural and people's livelihood in Ach Province (Draft Report), FAO, 2005

Hitchcock, David K and Hiraoka, Hiroshi: Back to Office Report, Indonesia 27 January - 19 February 2005, FAO February 2005

Hitchcock, David K and Hiraoka, Hiroshi: Back to Office Report, Indonesia 27 January - 19 February 2005,OSRO/INS/503/JPN, FAO, February 2005

IFC: Marine Fisheries Masterplan for Redevelopment in Aceh, Indonesia, Phase 1: Initial Fact-Finding and Data Collection on Current State of the Marine Fisheries Sector, IFC, February 2006

Imai, Shin and Sugiharto, Bambang: Initial Aero Survey Result on Tsunami Affected Area in Aceh, Indonesia, FAO, January 2005

Janssen, Hilde: Study on the Post-tsunami Rehabilitation of Fishing Communities and Fisheries-based Livelihoods in Indonesia, International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF), December 2005

Koperasi Pertanian Meuseuraya: Lhok Nga Cash for Work Project for Field Rehabilitation Agriculture Area Affected by Tsunami, Final Report, 2006

Kuru, George: Assessment of Timber Demand and Supply for Post-Tsunami Reconstruction in Indonesia, FAO, April 2005

Kuru, George: End of Mission Report, Forestry Programme for Early Rehabilitation in Asian Tsunami Affected Countries OSRO/GLO/502/FIN, FAO, 2005

Leperre, Philippe: Livestock Productions and Health Sector Nongroe Aceh Darussalam Indonesia, FAO, July 2005

Michael Shawyer: Report on Boat Building Activities in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (NAD), FAO, 2006

ODI/UNDP: Cash Learning Project Workshop in Aceh, Indonesia To Share Experience and Learning for Cash Interventions, FAO, June 2005

OISCA International: Distribution of Paddy Seed, Fertilizer, and Hand Tractor UN-FAO Grant AID for the Farmer in District of Bireuen, and District of Aceh Utara Nangroe Ache Darussalam (NAD), September 2005

Philipps, Michael and Budhiman, Agus: Tsunami Reconstruction, Fisheries Tsunami Emergency Programme - Indonesia, An assessment of the impacts of the 26th December 2004 earthquake and tsunami on aquaculture in the Provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, Indonesia, FAO, March 2005

Pushparajah, Murugesu: Coastal Protection and Spatial Planning in Indonesia, FAO, May 2005

Republic of Indonesia: Agriculture Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Plan Post Earthquake and Tsunami Disaster in Indonesia, Ministry of Agriculture, May 2005

Republic of Indonesia: Overview Agricultural Strategy and Work Plan 2006 Onward for Nias and Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, Indonesia, FAO and Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture and the Bureau for Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, Workshop Proceedings 22-23 November, Govt. of Indonesia, November 2005

Republic of Indonesia: Seed Law (unofficial title)

Savins, Mike and Lee, Robert: Fishing Vessel Quality Issues, Boat Building in the Tsunami Affected Areas of Aceh and Nias, FAO, 2005

Siar, S: Travel Report, Indonesia 14-27 May 2005, FAO, June 2005

Solidarités: Final Report, FAO Distribution - Aceh, 2005/2006, May 2006

Thupalli, Ravishankar: Forestry Assessment and Programme Planning, OSRO/GLO/502/FIN, FAO, November 2005

Turner, Jeremy: Travel Report, Indonesia 6 -16 June 2005, FAO, 2006

UN: United Nations Recovery Framework for Aceh and Nias, Draft, UN

UN: United Nations Strategy in Aceh and Nias, UN, 2005

UNORC: Recovery Report, Indonesia, December 2005

Vochten, Piet: End of Mission Report, FAO's Rehabilitation Support Coordination Unit in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, FAO

Vochten, Piet: Mission Report in support of the 3rd FAO Real-time Evaluation Mission of the FAO response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami, FAO, 2006

Westlund, Lena: Travel Report, 15-28 September, FAO project inception mission to Banda Aceh with debriefing at RAP, Bangkok, FAO, October 2005

Yayasan IDEP: Final Report for UNFAO, Cash for Work Program, 2006

Sri Lanka:

Chaya, Mona: Suggestions for ERCU SRL, after June 2006, FAO, May 2006

FAO/ICEI/DFAR: Livelihood Analysis Study in Kudalakki and surrounding communities Ampara District, FAO, November 2005

FAO/ICEI/DFAR: Livelihood Analysis Study in Vinayakapuram village Ampara District, FAO, November 2005

FAO/MFAR: Recovery Assessment in the Fisheries Sector, FAO/MFAR, June 2006

FAO: First Workshop on Livelihoods Approaches and Analysis, FAO, September 2005

FAO: Mitigation of Coastal Boat Oversupply, PPT presentation, July 2006

FAO: OSRO/SRL/503/JPN - Assistance for Affected Coastal Communities in Sri Lanka, Final Report, 2006

FAO: Proceedings of the Workshop to Develop Strategies for Advancement of Agricultural Sector in Tsunami Affected Areas of Sri Lanka, FAO, March 2006

FAO: Project OSRO/SRL/505/ITA - Profile of a Component for Capacity Building, 2005

FAO: Recovery Assessment in the Fisheries Sector, FAO, 2006

FAO: Second Workshop on Livelihoods Approaches and Analysis, FAO, October 2005

Gaeta Ruggieri, Agata and Sergerlund, Roger: Back to Office Report - Procurement Mission - Sri Lanka, FAO-AFSP, April 2005

Ganashamoorthi, s. Ramazzotti, M.: Livelihood analysis of Panama village, Ampara district, Ricerca e Cooperazione, October 2005

Government of Sri Lanka: Strategy and Programme for Reconstruction and Development of the Agricultural Sector in Tsunami Affected Areas, Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Land and Irrigation, April 2005

Government of Sri Lanka: Strategy Programme for Post-Tsunami Reconstruction and Development of the Marine Fisheries Sector, MFAR, April 2006

Ranaweera, N.F.C with Jayasinghe, C.H. de A. and Mahrouf, A.R.M.: Real Time Evaluation of FAO Operation to the Tsunami Emergency: Beneficiary Assessment of Interventions in the Fisheries and Agriculture sectors In Northeast and Southern Provinces of Sri Lanka, Final Report, FAO, Sri Lanka, March 2006

Thailand:

Caldeyro Stajano, Martin: Emergency Assistance to the Affected Farmers to Restart Agricultural Production in Southern Thailand, First Mission Report, FAO, March 2006

FAO: A Technical Assessment for Determining the Level of Fishing Capacity on Resources Access and Other Fishery-Related Issue in the Impacted Areas, FAO, June 2006

FAO: A Tsunami Related Agricultural Damage Assessment in the Southern part of Thailand: Ranong, Phang Nga, Phuket, Krabi, Trang and Satun Provinces, FAO, June 2006

FAO: Emergency Assistance to Support the Rehabilitation in the Earthquake/Tsunami - Affected Areas, FAO, Rome. 2006

FAO: Emergency Assistance to the Affected Farmers to Restart Agricultural Production in Southern Thailand, Final Report, FAO, June 2006

FAO: Establishment of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System and Capacity Building of Mangrove Research Stations of DMCR for the Use of RS/GIS in Tsunami Affected Provinces in Thailand, FAO, June 2006

FAO: Establishment of Technical Capacities of the local Government on the Application of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System in an Integrated Coastal Land Use Planning and Forest Ecosystem management, FAO, June 2006

FAO: Japan/FAO Joint Emergency Assistance to Support Tsunami-Affected Coastal Fishing Communities in Southern Thailand, OSRO/THA/501/JPN, Final Report, 2005

FAO: Progress in Post-Tsunami Rehabilitation in the Fisheries Sector in Thailand, March 2006

FAO: Report of Joint FAO/MOAC Detailed Technical Damages and Needs Assessment Mission in Fisheries and Agricultural Sectors in Tsunami Affected Six Provinces in Thailand, FAO/MOAC, February 2005

FAO: Report on National Workshop on the In-Depth Tsunami Damage Assessment of Mangroves and Other Coastal Forests in Thailand, FAO, July 2006

FAO: Scientific Studies on Tsunami Affected Mangroves and Other Coastal Forests in the Southern Part of the Country: Ranong, Phang Nga, Phuket, Krabi, Trang and Satun Provinces, FAO, June 2006

FAO: Strengthening the Coordination and Assessment of Fishing Resources and Inputs Provided by Tsunami Emergency Relief, Final Report, FAO, June 2006

FAO: THA/05/002 - Emergency Assistance to Tsunami-affected Fishing Communities in Southern Thailand, Profile of Fisheries Groups, 2006

Kamnalrut, Apinan: Report on the Net House Vegetable Production, FAO, June 2006

Korsieporn, Kanjapat: Beneficiary Assessment in the Context of the Real Time Evaluation of FAO Operation in Response to the Tsunami Emergency, October 2005

Nuntagij, Itthisuntorn: Emergency Assistance to the Affected Farmers to Restart Agricultural Production in Southern Thailand, Mission Report, FAO, April 2006

The Maldives:

Abdulla, Shehenaz: Maldives, Post-Tsunami Reconstruction Project, WB, 2005

FAO, Emergency Operations and Rehabilitation Division (TCE), ORSO/MDV/503/JPN Final Report, FAO-TCE, May 2006

FAO: AUD 306, Tsunami - Maldives, FAO- Office of the Inspector General, March 2006

FAO: ORSO/MDV/501/BEL Final Report, FAO-TCE, May 2006

FAO: ORSO/MDV/502/JPN Final Report, FAO-TCE, May 2006

Meekness, Derrick: Boatbuilders Report Inspection and Delivery of "Bokkuraas", FAO, April 2006

Musangu, Kamina Ntenda: End of Assignment Report, TCEO Tsunami Emergency Operations, FAO, July 2005

Thupalli, Ravishankar: Forestry Assessment and Programme Planning, OSRO/GLO/502/FIN, FAO, November 2005

Yoshimura, Yuko: Back to Office Report ORSO/MDV/502/JPN and OSRO/MDV/503/JPN, FAO, December 2005

[1] Tsunami Evaluation Coalition - Synthesis Report - 2006.

[2] Originally designed to end in June 2005, the Flash Appeal was first extended to the end of 2005 and later to mid-2006, reflecting the intensity of the damage and the difficulties in spending the vast resources received in a time frame similar to that of previous emergency responses. Further requests from agencies for an extension of all Flash Appeal-funded projects towards the end of 2006 were turned down by OCHA, who recommended agencies to instead seek approval from individual donors on a project by project basis.

[3] Since then, the Avian Flu programme has topped this record.

[4] Tsunami Evaluation Coalition - Synthesis Report - 2006.

[5] Additionally, US$1,200,000 were allocated to the country by the Finish forestry project.

[6] The number of boats to be built was significantly reduced from a target of 150 specified in the contracts to 86 at present, in order to reflect stiff price increase in material and labour during the prolonged implementation process.

[7] FAO was allegedly the first UN agency to survey the East and North, starting as early as 31 December 2004.

[8] Additionally, US$750,000 were allocated to the country by the Finish forestry project. Towards the end of 2006, ECHO has also approved new projects targeted at both tsunami-affected and conflict-affected people, not reviewed by the RTE and not accounted here.

[9] Except in LTTE-controlled areas in the North and East where Cey-Nor was not present and where FAO chose to cooperate informally with AJ Fishing, a private company which repaired some 400 boats with fiber and resin provided by FAO.

[10] This activity, implemented toward the second half of 2006, could not be evaluated by the RTE.

[11] See in particular the Recovery Assessment in the Fisheries Sector conducted by MFAR and FAO in December 2005 and published in final form in May 2006, as well as the presentation entitled Mitigation of Coastal Boat Oversupply, Survey Results from Matara, FAO 2006.

[12] Up to US$100,000 per transaction.

[13] Additionally, US$500,000 were allocated to the country by the Finish forestry project.

[14] However, the Fisheries Department Coordination and Technical Support Unit (CTSU) appointed a liaison officer in Bangkok in 2006.

[15] CONSRN is the Consortium to restore shattered livelihoods of communities in tsunami affected nations. It includes the Bay of Bengal Programme – Intergovernmental Organization (BOBP-IGO), the Asia Pacific Fisheries Commission (APFIC), the Network of Aquaculture Centres in Asia-Pacific (NACA), the South East Asia Fisheries Development Centres (SEAFDEC), the WorldFish Centre (WorldFish) and FAO.

[16] Country-level activities of project OSRO/GLO/502/FIN are reported above under specific countries above.

[17] Tsunami Evaluation Coalition - Desk review on needs assessments in Food Security/Food aid - Cristina Lopriore, FAO 2005.

[18] One of the most promising elements of the sustainable livelihoods approach is the emphasis it places on building upon strengths and assets possessed by communities to avoid dependency and encourage empowerment.

[19] The Japanese contribution, provided very early, funded most of the FAO response during the first half of 2005.

[20] In practice, this was not felt as a major constraint as the concerned NGOs were reasonably efficient.

[21] Through the Flash Appeal mechanism, whose end date was originally set for 30 June 2005, then extended to 31 December 2005, and finally to 30 June 2006.

[22] See in particular the Joint Multi-Donor Evaluation of the FAO Kosovo Emergency Programme (2000), the Thematic Evaluation of Strategy A3 (2002) and the Synthesis of Findings of Two FAO Internal Evaluations of Work at Country Level - Southern Africa and Afghanistan (2004).

[23] Cf. Financial Committee document FC 102/14 and FAO Council document CL 127/22.

[24] FAO: Contribution of the Government of Japan to the FAO Component of the Flash Appeal 2005 for Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami – June 2006.

[25] As opposed to $25,000 for FAORs.

[26] Items delivered at a later stage in Thailand were mainly due to the utilization of remaining budgetary balance, the approval of new projects, or in the case of fruit seedlings, the deliberate and technically correct decision to synchronize distribution with the planting season (October).

[27] An imprest bank account was opened in Banda Aceh in December 2005 and became operational by 10 February 2006, finally placing the RSCU in a position to effectively handle operations from the field.

[28] A document used to obtain services from a public institution or an civil society organization for a defined objective, akin to a project document in which FAO acts as donor and the other party as the implementer.

[29] ADG TCD Office Memorandum dated 30/01/2006.

[30] Even LoAs signed by TCE (i.e. under US$100,000) have to go to all the relevant technical divisions for clearance (several involved here), as well as to AFSP, AFDS and for house style editing..

[31] Principle 18 of the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative recommends that donors “support mechanisms for contingency planning by humanitarian organisations, including, as appropriate, allocation of funding, to strengthen capacities for response” (http://www.goodhumanitariandonorship.org/).

[32] Some in Sri Lanka used the phrase “competitive compassion” to describe this phenomenon.

[33] An Administrative Task Force was established to streamline FAO’s procedures in emergencies and presented selected proposals. The Director-General Bulletin 2006/19 of May 2006 endorsed some of these, notably the possibility, on a case by case basis, to delegate increased authority to field offices to reflect inflation since the authority levels were last adjusted, the possibility to sign multiple LoAs with the same organization and the establishment of separate administrative modalities and employment conditions for national project personnel. All three measures were recommended in the second RTE report.

[34] BRR was created in part to bridge that capacity gap.

[35] Tsunami Evaluation Coalition. Thematic report on Coordination of International Humanitarian Assistance in Tsunami-affected Countries. July 2006.

[36] This approach was recommended in the TEC Coordination Report (Coordination of International Humanitarian Assistance in Tsunami-Affected Countries, Evaluation Findings, by J. Bennett et al., 2006). The report does not make reference to the Sri Lanka experience in the fisheries sector, probably because the TEC terms of reference did not extend to examining the performance of national governments.

[37] FAO studies indicate that, while there are very few fishermen who did not receive the assistance they deserved, as much as a quarter of the beneficiaries of new boats from all NGOs and donors were neither fishermen nor boat owners before the tsunami. See Mitigation of Coastal Boat Oversupply, Survey Results from Matara (presentation to the fisheries coordination forum in Colombo), FAO 2006.

[38] The first draft report for the Recovery Assessment in the Fisheries Sector, dated December 2005, stated that “overall, only 46% of the destroyed boats have been replaced by new boats”, while the “Matara survey” (Summary results from Dickwella DS Division – Matara, in Mitigation of Coastal Boat Oversupply, a presentation to the fisheries coordination forum in Colombo issued in April 2006) indicated that 93% of damaged boats had been repaired and 95% of destroyed boats replaced in the survey sites.

[39] For Instance, the boat replacement programme in Indonesia concerned only small boats for small-scale fishermen, while the Sri Lanka boat repair programme targeted both the large and small boats.

[40] In line with proposition 2 of the UN Special Envoy’s “two-year after” report: “Recovery must promote fairness and equity.” Lessons Learned from Tsunami Recovery, Key Propositions for Building Back Better, A Report by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, William J. Clinton, December 2006.

[41] Along the same line, another risk is that the assets delivered in the tsunami response, of which those under FAO control were only a minor part, had the potential to create tensions with adjacent communities who were not directly impacted by the tsunami but at the very least shared in many of the social and economic disruptions. In conditions of pre-existing conflict (e.g. in Sri Lanka and NAD in Indonesia), this issue was potentially sensitive.

[42] Evaluating the impact of forestry operations on the restoration of sustainable livelihoods was not possible given the respective time frames of the forestry project and the RTE: the rehabilitation of coastal forests in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives (plantation of mangrove, other coastal forest and also urban trees in Sri Lanka) was still at an early stage during the third and last RTE mission in June 2006.

[43] See Yayasan IDEP: UNFAO Cash for Work Program in Desa Suak Pante Breu, Kecamatan Samatiga, Aceh Barat, 2006; and Solidarités: Final Report, May 2006.

[44] The World Bank has recently unveiled a rapid response plan, involving the creation of a new fund for rapid release of resources, a reduction of up-front controls and more thorough evaluation of projects once they have started. Cf. World Bank unveils rapid response aid plan, Financial Times, March 6 2007.

[45] “Provide humanitarian assistance in ways that are supportive of recovery and long-term development, striving to ensure support, where appropriate, to the maintenance and return of sustainable livelihoods and transitions from humanitarian relief to recovery and development activities.”

[46] Younger staff may lack credibility with ministries and IFIs, but connect well with humanitarian donors and NGOs.

[47] To the extent possible, including an assessment of partner organizations’ capacities.

[48] Issues such as admin/finance rules and processes will be taken into account, but are expected to be dealt with by dedicated, separate missions.

[49] N.B. This will be difficult at beneficiaries’ level: the RTE main mission can do it only indirectly. It is suggested to include national beneficiary assessments (on a case study basis) in the three major countries concerned.

[50] Due to changing circumstances in the field and the flexible nature of the RTE, additional missions cannot be ruled out. The need for this should be considered at the time of the second workshop.

[51] The mission composition will vary according to the stages of the RTE: the composition defined here applies to the first RTE mission starting in May 2005.

[52] Also to coordinate the national beneficiary impact assessment studies. These national consultants should be kept on a retainer in order to participate not only in country missions, but also so as to provide some continuity of feedback in between missions.

Sunday 23 September 2012

Real Time Evaluation

Indonesia

Sri Lanka

Thailand

The Maldives

3. Earmarking resources and budgeting

Part IV – Operational Capacity and Efficiency

Non-Governmental and Community-Based Organizations

2. Coordination with a broader set of partners

2. Impacts on the restoration of livelihoods

Agriculture livelihoods

Forestry sector

7. Participatory approaches and SLA

Annexes

Annex 1:

Terms of Reference for a

Real Time Evaluation of FAO Operations

in Response to the Tsunami Emergency

Annex 2: Itineraries

First mission:

Second mission:

Third mission:

Annex 3: Persons Met

Annex 4: Main Consulted Documents

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