Inter-Agency Real Time Evaluation of the Humanitarian ... - alnap

IA RTE of the humanitarian response to Pakistan’s 2010 Floods crisis
Clusters). The general impression is therefore that the mere scale of the disaster made it
impossible for the humanitarian community to respond effectively through 11 clusters. While
the cluster roll‐out has been dealt with in earlier evaluations, including IA‐RTEs, the UN still has
to act on relevant recommendations.
68. Despite divergent views on what is the ideal setup, international organisations managed
to mobilised responses that benefitted parts of the affected population; some responses went
through collaboration with line departments or NDMA, while others went directly through
implementing partners on the ground. Some examples of positive responses are: Mobile teams
for disease early warning systems (DEWS) which have been successful in ensuring that timely
action is taken to control disease outbreaks. Collective effort, under the so‐called “survival
strategy approach” which integrated food, nutrition and WASH, has also generally been
considered to be an effective measure as major epidemic outbreaks have been avoided. The
WFP and its partners managed to scale up its food emergency distributions from three to eight
million beneficiaries from August to October which is also considered a significant achievement,
preventing millions from temporary hunger.
69. The response also had some positive “side‐effects”, such as improving access to and
awareness of health and education, issuing of women ID cards (upon detecting that many
women did not have access to assistance due to lack of proper identification), as well as
improving awareness and habits related to basic hygiene habits among the affected population,
such as open air defecation, screening of over 750,000 children for malnutrition with treatment
of over 80,000 most acute cases 28 .
70. Two dominant humanitarian response modalities emerged; some organisations adopting
a multi‐sector area‐based approach while the others shaped around sector‐based priorities.
While the first rolled out integrated responses, providing an integral and multi‐sector
complementary response, the second approach focused on specific sector interventions (e.g.
delivery of NFIs). While the relief phase saw some thematic regrouping, yet an integrated
approach in areas of return and recovery is yet to be developed.
6.3 Constraints
71. The unfolding nature and scale of the disaster posed severe operational difficulties for
both the GoP and humanitarian agencies, including; the sheer size of the caseload of affected
people combined with limited level of preparedness, underlying political issues, limited access
and security constraints, limited presence of humanitarian actors throughout entire parts of the
country, inadequate human and financial means, poor capacity to prioritise, limited capacity
among staff and appliance of IASC guidelines, etc. These constraints meant that soon after the
28
Nutrition Cluster Brief, 23 January 2011
http://pakresponse.info/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=QBCyuHI5eNc%3d&tabid=83&mid=492
Riccardo Polastro, Aatika Nagrah, Nicolai Steen and Farwa Zafar
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