After Typhoon Haiyan, the biggest in the world, devastated large areas of the country in 2013, CARE Philippines helped over 15,500 families to rebuild their homes. Funded recovery programmes tend to be expert-led rather than community-led and people are typically displaced from their communities and given emergency shelter. But the people affected cannot always wait for outside support and ‘self-recovery’ accounts for around 90% of all the repairs and rebuilding of homes after a natural disaster.
This programme supported the ‘self-recovery’ of lives and homes after the typhoon hit, by providing guidance, equipment, cash grants and technical assistance. By using locally available materials and debris from destroyed houses they have helped families to avoid relocation, retain the rights to their homes and land, and to maintain their social ties. Through training on how to make their houses safer, local people have become more resilient to natural disasters.
Support for ‘self-recovery’ is an approach that could reach a much greater scale. Combining basic guidance, simple tools and resources allows humanitarian agencies to help more people. It makes the most of natural human resilience and enables people to take charge of their own recovery.
