The changes that our programme is designed to facilitate - where sustainable is focused on "sustaining human life during this period of extreme risk; or interventions that link relief to recovery. What interventions will we directly engage in to meet the needs of the targeted communities? And how will we define eligibility, prioritise vulnerability and, where we are not providing 100% coverage of eligible families/people, select beneficiaries?
The results (presented in a Logic Model & Results Framework) are our explanation of the needs of the community and how we can best support/address these needs. The results must be linked (internal design logic & continuity of narrative) to the context, situation, needs & community analysis. Trocaire has defined humanitarian as "where a single or series of disasters overwhelms the ability of the most vulnerable in society to cope” which, using the LRRD theory has two key stages:
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Crisis Stage (LR): Any intervention must prioritise the needs of the targeted beneficiary group which is determined by the affect/impact of the humanitarian situation (sudden or slow-onset; safety of the operating environment [after-shock, bombings]; anticipated duration of the intervention/dependency of the beneficiary on external assistance; etc.).
Linking Relief...
Live-saving: where an immediate intervention is required to simply save a life (e.g. immediate food & nutrition aid); and
Life-preserving: where we are looking to reduce the risk to a person’s life once it has been “saved” (e.g. health & hygiene interventions directly designed to reduce disease & contagion)
...to Recovery & Rehabilitation:
Life-sustaining: when the immediate risks to life have been mitigated and we can focus on recovery & rehabilitation (e.g. family livelihoods; looking to build resilience of the family beyond a single season)
... to Development:
Life-enhancing: Once a family has some degree of certainty (resilience) over food & income then the focus can move to quality of life (the D in LRRD)
Resilience Stage (RD): Many, if not all of Trocaire’s humanitarian responses to the drought (& other seasonal emergencies) in East Africa has been founded on an LRRD rationale; building resilience. We can interpret resilience in many ways but in Humanitarian programmes the focus is on the resilience of the person – initially the individual (e.g. OTP nutrition assistance) then the family (e.g. protection rations, family-based NFIs), then the community (multiple-families) and finally the locality (the environment around the family/community). Activities may occur concurrently (e.g. designing environmentally-friendly interventions to provide immediate assistance to families, such as cash-for-work; working with community & locality simultaneously, etc.) but the focus is still person-centric.
1.Resilience of the person and the family: there is no food production without people and so individuals need to have the capacity to
a.produce their food (the land, the physical energy, the husbandry skills),
b.store their food (post-harvest management),
c.preserve their longer-term sources of nutrition (e.g. food preservation to support families through the “hunger gap” between seasons), and
d.to commercialise their assets (food surpluses, alternative livelihoods) so as to generate a flexible, financial buffer to support them during lean times (whether poor harvests of full-on drought).
2.Resilience of the family and the community: The challenge of focusing on resilience is to change the attitudes of people towards the traditional, culturally influenced approach to livelihoods and food production.
a.Sustenance farming which leaves families susceptible to the “hunger gap” between season is as negative as resilient seeds being planted in areas that cannot provide sufficient water and spoil nutrients for this type of planting
b.Similarly the attitude of many pastoralists, seeing their livestock as “wealth” in itself does not build resilience of those pastoralists. From a resilience perspective livestock is nutrition (milk and meat) and income (sale of livestock to create that flexible, financial buffer)
In order to successfully link crisis interventions with the longer-term potential of resilience-building an additional Theory of Change must be adapted, that of Innovation Adaptation theory (Rogers, 1962) to support the link between the relief phase and the resilience stage.
This theory states that ‘early adopters’ and individuals with peer influence are the first to be targeted to take up modified behaviours and others are encouraged to follow once personal risks have been better evaluated and additional rewards demonstrated. Where needs are identified in the situation or needs analysis that are not directly addressed in the programme/intervention results we must acknowledge either how we will incorporate these needs (e.g. referral to another party, advocacy on key "consequences", etc.) or provide an explicit reason (consistent with our programme/intervention) why we cannot.
