By Venkatesh Raghavendra and Nir Tsuk

Social entrepreneurs who cope with disasters and are deeply involved in rescue, relief rehabilitation, and reconstruction efforts are

Photo © GOONJ GOONJ volunteers dispatching recycled goods from Delhi

demonstrating the power of applying local peoples' knowledge and leadership to catastrophe response, and that tapping robust social networks produces a quick and nimble response. Although international aid is necessary and important, community support and communal solutions often are quicker, cheaper, and more effective in both the short and the long term.

Moreover, community-based responses demonstrate how an intelligent division of labor between the various sectors of society—business, government, and the citizen sector—avoids having relief efforts derailed or needlessly duplicated, and waste of valuable energies where such mistakes can cost lives.

Politics plays a crucial role because it isn't just nature that creates humanitarian crises. The poor and other marginalized groups are repeatedly caught on the frontlines of disasters. These same groups are excluded from the decision-making process that determines their post-disaster future. Conflict-ridden zones such as Sri Lanka, Aceh in Indonesia and inland Turkey always seem to be the last to recover.

Yet crises create great opportunities for change—be it political, cultural, economic or social; harsh images of demolition and terror may blend with hopes for a new beginning and long-awaited structural transformations. For example, an astonishing development in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami last year was the way that communities organized themselves to collect and distribute food within a day of the disaster, said Prof. Harendra De Silva, founder and ex-chairman of the National Child Protection Authority of Sri Lanka and an Ashoka Fellow.

The community participation, sense of responsibility, and rapid response to the disaster was amazing to witness, he said. Although nothing was pre-planned and reactions were haphazard in many ways, the community effectively ensured that starvation was not a major problem in any of the affected areas.

Sri Lankans have faced tragedies of war, insurgence, and flood, and many families have suffered the consequences for more than two decades. But they have managed to respond positively soon after each of these disasters, thanks to their strong communal networks, De Silva said. It is the resilience of the community that allows everyone to look forward. "In this regard I feel that our population is much stronger than those in many other Western countries," he said.

"There was a sense of wanting to change, a change for a better future," said Dr. Ajantha Perera, chairman of the Lanka Environmental Recyclers Institute and an Ashoka Fellow. Her institute is recycling debris from the tsunami to allow survivors to build low-cost housing in Sri Lanka, and she also sees an opportunity in this disaster. "These thoughts came from the people who were affected and the organizations that were involved. This hope was above the tragedy that they have faced.

"All the communities worked together. It was wonderful to feel close to each other. The doors were open to strangers and their ideas. People were thankful for all they received."

Prof. De Silva said he saw a similar reaction when barriers stemming from ethnicity, religion, class, and politics were shattered suddenly. People in the affected areas, despite having lost family members or homes and belongings, still reached out to those who were more severely affected in whatever ways they could. They shared food, took care of each other's children and the elderly, comforted each other, and safeguarded others' properties.

The ability to use planning to anticipate disaster and mitigate damage through the application of local knowledge and participation of community networks is not exclusive to Sri Lanka. The Madhubani, Sitamarhi, and Darbanga districts of North Bihar in northern India are flooded year after year like many other districts of the state. Several villages can be cut off from the contact with the rest of the world for up to three to four months, said Juhi Roy, a community development consultant who works extensively with local organizations such as Sakhi and village communities in Bihar's flood-prone areas.

Communities in these districts are pursuing a wide range of activities to manage their own disaster planning and immediate relief efforts. They have constructed floodgates and protective earth embankments in low-lying areas to create safe pockets that act as shelters and protective spaces for cattle during floods' onslaught. These pockets also help maintain subsistence farming, which meets critical survival needs during crisis periods that can last for several weeks.

The communities have engaged in boat-building projects to help provide immediate rescue and relief, and to reduce the time it takes to bring life back to normal. They have taken ownership of their fresh water sources so that they remain secure and accessible to most people and are not submerged during floods.

Similar initiatives have created toilet and sanitation facilities that can survive flooding. The absence of these facilities has endangered health during the prolonged flood seasons, so communities have made sanitation a priority and this has mitigated the risk of disease and infections.

All of these community projects are driven by village-level self-governing bodies called gram panchayats. If and when relief funds from the government trickle down to the community level, it is because villagers have been pushing the government to invest in and bolster such community-based initiatives, rather than an attempt to appease people through handouts.

The role of women in preparing for disaster is significant. Through a vast network of self-help groups, women are trained in storage of food grains, health and hygiene, and management of resources after a disaster.

Self-help groups that are well established in the south India state of Tamil Nadu helped efficiently mobilize their communities and its available resources after the tsunami disaster, said Sriram Ayer, founder of Nalanda Way, an organization that has developed a mentor-based learning system for children in slums in south India, and was very involved in tsunami relief efforts. These groups, primarily set up to tackle poverty through micro-finance, were already well versed in networking, responding to extraordinary situations, and negotiating with the government and other policy-making bodies, Ayer said.

Thus, they were able to quickly jump in and play a key role in relief compensation, protecting land rights, and keeping land-grabbers and vested interest groups at bay. They were able to keep in check unscrupulous elements that tried to take advantage of the situation in the guise of being legitimate citizen sector organizations.

One example of the intelligent division of labor between business, government, and citizen sectors occurred when the "Friends of the Malays" was formed immediately after the tsunami disaster in a predominately Buddhist region of Sri Lanka, said Lalith Seneviratne, an Ashoka Fellow there. This organization joined forces with a Christian charity to help the Malay residents who are exclusively Muslim.

Besides rallying behind this community in its time of need, the organization sent a strong signal of tolerance and unity in these divisive times in Sri Lanka. Following its initial rehabilitation efforts, the organization has acquired a piece of land from the government where it plans to build houses, taking into account the sensitivities of community residents who, despite the availability of housing through standard citizen sector channels, prefer to remain in a distinct cluster, Seneviratne said.

The tsunami, despite its horrendous effects, was to a large extent "a story of collaborations for us," says Anshu Gupta, founder of GOONJ, an Indian organization that maintains a network of grassroots groups that recycles goods to the needy and provides relief supplies for a wide range of disasters. "We invested our energies in motivating people and organizations to generate specific material and support. By spending a small sum of Rs.3,00,000 in the first three months we generated material worth more than Rs 15 million."

GOONJ is successfully bridging the gap between civil society and businesses: "A number of leading corporate houses collected material on our specific guidelines," Gupta said. "Our appeals for material were specific to the point that when we asked for 2 kg of rice and a few grams of tea leaf from every child in Delhi schools, we collected truck loads of rice and tea leaf.

"Thus no single individual was burdened, and specific needs of the affected people were met. The same approach was taken for the schooling needs where thousands of children made small contributions that added up to huge quantities of school supplies. With the engagement of the citizens and creating a climate for collaborations, GOONJ was able to convert the wastage from the tsunami relief efforts into a case of massive resource generation."

The year 2005 was filled with news of disasters, beginning with the tsunami that hit the shores of the Andaman Sea at the end of 2004, floods and hurricanes in Central America, an earthquake in India and Pakistan, and deteriorating drought and famine in parts of Africa. They have taken a severe toll but have also provided an opportunity for us to distil some lessons that enable us to better face potential disasters, and will help ensure that human actions contribute solutions and remedies rather than make bad situations worse.