What is it about?
Preparedness is an essential aspect of the humanitarian action. Local communities and authorities must be prepared to the eventuality of a crisis to mitigate its negative impact, and humanitarian actors must be adequately prepared to provide an efficient and timely response. One of the functions of the cluster is to build national capacity in preparedness and contingency planning, and WASH coordination team is therefore fully involved in the WASH sector emergency preparedness. WCC must coordinate the preparation of the WASH Emergency Response Plan (ERP) with the partners, and participate in inter-sector and inter-agencies emergency planning process. ERP is inextricably linked to capacity mapping and development, and many tools and approaches are the same for both process.
Preparing local authorities to take on WASH humanitarian coordination is part of the general preparedness process led by clusters. Transition from a cluster to a sector-led coordination must be anticipated well in advance, and can only occur once context is more stabilized.
It is also when the context is more stabilized that lesson-learned documentation can be produced, to learn from the previous emergency response and improve the future ones.
What are your objectives?
- Develop a common understanding of risks among all stakeholders
- Establish a system to monitor those risks to ensure early action is taken when required
- Design programs aiming at developing the capacities of the whole WASH sector (partners, communities, local market, local authorities...) to better react to potential threats
- Act upon the WASH humanitarian response system to ensure that WASH humanitarian actors have the proper mechanism and tools to coordinate the WASH response
- Develop sets of informations and tools, including the development of contingency plans for specific risks, that can be used as the basis for initial planning in Flash Appeal or other Strategic Planning document
What you have to do at least?