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Bangladesh

Bangladesh - Planning and Implementation of Post-Sidr Housing Recovery: Practice, Lessons and Future Implications September 2014 Recovery Framework Case Study

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INTRODUCTION

The World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the European Union (EU) are working on a guide for developing disaster recovery frameworks (DRF). This guide aims to help governments and partners plan for resilient post disaster recovery while contributing to longer term sustainable development. It is based on practices gleaned from country experiences in disaster recovery around the world. Hence, the development of the DRF Guide entailed the development of country-level case studies as well as thematic case studies on disaster recovery.

These case studies have been designed to collect and analyze information on: i) disaster recovery standards and principles adapted by countries for specific disasters; ii) planning efforts for making such recovery efficient, equitable and resilient; iii) policies, institutions and capacities to implement and monitor disaster recovery; and iv) ways and means for translating the gains of resilient recovery into longer-term risk reduction and resilient development.

Importantly, these case studies aim to learn from, and not evaluate, country reconstruction initiatives. Practices learned from each country’s experience will inform the contents of the guide for developing a DRF. Additionally, the case studies examine the planning processes and not the implementation details of recovery experiences. As such, they do not seek to offer a comprehensive account of the post-disaster recovery program, but instead provide details and insight into the decision-making processes for reconstruction policies and programs.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This case study, ‘Bangladesh: Planning and Implementation of Post-Sidr Housing Recovery: Practice, Lessons and Future Implications’, was conducted in 2014 to document the lessons learned from the housing recovery operation carried out in the wake of Cyclone Sidr that hit Bangladesh in 2007. The cyclone, which caused damage to over a million houses, prompted arguably the largest ever housing recovery in the country’s disaster history. In a fi rst, housing was considered an integral component of a principle-led recovery that sought to reach out to the most vulnerable sections of society, as opposed to random repairs and reconstruction of houses in the past. The recovery operation, infl uenced by an array of national and international agencies and their strategies and approaches, has brought about a visible change in the housing recovery practices of Bangladesh.

Thus, the post-Sidr recovery operation offers important lessons for Bangladesh and other countries in shaping effective post-disaster recovery guidelines.

The themes discussed in this report are specifi c to the post-Sidr housing recovery, namely:

• the institutional mechanisms to implement and manage recovery;
• policies, planning and prioritization for recovery;
• designing, costing and fi nancing recovery; and
• monitoring and evaluation for disaster recovery.

The objectives of this case study are to examine:

• how disaster recovery standards and principles are adopted and applied;
• the methods adopted for planning effi cient and resilient recovery;
• the lessons learned on policy, institutions and local capacity; and
• the ways in which recovery is translated into long-term disaster risk reduction and development.