Enabling Poverty Development

Myanmar Cyclone Problem Tree

We had some fantastic session with the Emergency Team on Monday Tuesday and Wednesday last week. We finished off the problem tree for the Myanmar Cyclone response on Friday and are now rapidly finishing off the logical framework. It is so great to have a diverse range of views to nut out this tricky response. The crisis team were really happy with our summarised tree(below). I have copied the problem tree below to give readers an insight into the thought processes of an organisations emergency response. It certainly gets the adrenaline running working under time pressure and to save lives and reduce suffereing. Talk to you all again soon.

Gender and Disaster

The cyclone in Mayanmar has had a large impact on Inepd. The disaster brings up many issues on how best to respond to respond to a disaster of this type. One issue that is often overlooked is gender. The initial discussions we have had on what type of response over the last week have missed some crucial points concerning gender and disasters. I also felt that there was no discussion about program details like formation of committees. We have started to draw up a logframe in the Asia unit to aid the response and think through some of the main issues. We are first developing a problem tree and expect to be finished this by the end of the week and then we will share this with the emergency unit and incorporate their feedback. The we will present it at the crisis team meeting next week. I think this approach is crucial in defining the goals of the response and ensuring its quality. I have been a bit disapointed with Brian the field representative in Myanmar who has not taken the time give feedback on our initial problem tree analysis. However, I think we have enough information coming from reliefweb and alertnet to understand the main issues.

Meeting for Poverty Development

Mercedes from the communication department asked me to write a blog about Poverty Development in Asia. The idea is to give supporters, staff and the public a look day by day into the work of the International Network for Poverty Development. I couldn't have started this blog at a worse time should truth be told. We have some major international meetings coming up, plus we are in the prepration stages of the Inepd Asia Strategic Plan. Not only this we have the organisations strategic plan to develop and the Asia and organisation operational plans. These annual plans take around 6 months to develop with a lot of back and forth from the field to HQ and back again. In all for asia there can be atleast 80 people commenting on the reports with upto 4 drafts. It is a tough job for Fran the South Asia programme officer to sort through all the comments and piece together a workable document.

I am now preparing for the Asia Inepd International Affiliates Coordination meeting that will be held in Bangkok next week. This is where all the big wigs from the region get together and punch out our global strategic plan for the coming year. Last year we held the meeting in Bali, I felt that we needed to chose a more formal work focused setting this year. It took a bit of persauding, in fact the whole of the last session of the meeting, but I'm glad we took the time to resolve this issue. The theme of next weeks meeting will be: Strategic Planning for Gender Poverty Development

I will be pushing strongly that it is vital that we ensure that a consultative approach is taken to ensure gender specific language is incorporated into the final document and that a strategic framework is development along with the plan to roll out the plan with specific elements relating to being pro gender for the poorest of the poor. I think that without this the document will just sit on the shelf gathering dust. I think it is also important to push for these kind of issues. Often there is an elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. So I hope for a suceesful coming year in poverty development that we confront the elephant.