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Assessment of Collaboration for Incident Response Preparedness: A Collaborative Project Among the Animal And Plant Health Inspection Service, National Association of State Departments of Agriculture And Other Key State Organizations
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| Presenter(s):
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| Anna Rinick,
United States Department of Agriculture,
anna.l.rinick@aphis.usda.gov
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| Kenneth Waters,
United States Department of Agriculture,
kenneth.e.waters@aphis.usda.gov
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| Anne Dunigan,
United States Department of Agriculture,
anne.dunigan@aphis.usda.gov
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| Abstract:
Strategic alliances are an important way to achieve mutual goals and for organizations to gain benefits that could not be realized by individual efforts. Despite successful outcomes resulting from the long-standing alliance between APHIS and States related to incident preparedness and response, the strength of the alliances and especially the collaboration to support them have recently been called into question. This assessment of collaboration for incident response preparedness was itself a collaborative effort involving the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) and other members of the APHIS/State strategic alliance.
Data from surveys, interviews and listening sessions yielded four findings:
•People have different ideas and language about collaboration which affect the effectiveness of communication, activities, and the results of the collaboration.
•State and APHIS collaboration is imperative for incident response preparedness but neither APHIS nor State expectations about the needed levels of collaboration are being fully met.
•Within APHIS and within State organizations, strong internal collaboration is needed to guide and support successful strategic alliances.
•States and APHIS collaborate effectively, particularly where there are strong communication and relationship building skills; when these skills are lacking, productivity and progress suffers.
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Converting Perception to Reality: A Case Study of Post Disaster Reconstruction Monitoring and Evaluation Model of ERRA
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| Presenter(s):
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| Khadija Khan,
Pakistan Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority,
khadijakhan01@yahoo.com
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| Abstract:
Converting Perception into Reality
A massive earthquake of a scale of 7.6 struck Pakistan on October 8, 2005, resulting in huge loss of life and property across an area of 30000 sq. km. and displacing 3.5 million people in nine districts in the northern areas of Pakistan.
In response, the Government of Pakistan established Federal Relief Commission (FRC) and Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) to address the challenges of relief and reconstruction respectively.
ERRA launched its program in April 2006 with a financial outlay of about US$ 5 billion, mobilized through soft loans and grants from IFIs, UN, foreign governments and international development agencies, to reconstruct physical and social infrastructure in the affected areas encompassing twelve major sectors i.e. Housing (rural, urban and town planning), livelihoods, education, health, water and sanitation, government buildings, power, roads, communication, social protection, environment and tourism industry.
The task included reconstruction of some 600,000 housing units, town planning and reconstruction of 4 destroyed urban city areas, more than 3000 education institutions, 300 health facilities, 6440 km of roads and thousands of destroyed water and sanitation facilities. On the human side, it included looking after for a large number of vulnerable populations of widows, female headed households, orphans, disabled and homeless elderly male and female.
ERRA, being a policy making body, had to implement its program through its affiliates at State, Provincial and District levels. It was also answerable to ERRA Board and ERRA Council for the delivery of its program and achievement of results. A devolved financial management system was introduced in the organization to expedite the process of decision making at every level with well defined authority.
Simultaneously, in order to ensure high performance, quality of work, transparency and accountability, ERRA developed a Monitoring and Evaluation System with five main components working from head office to the filed offices right at the reconstruction sites. For the purpose of the study the system is taken as a ‘Model’.
The five components that said to be forming the model were: Project Monitoring, Internal Audit, External Audit, Impact Assessment and Third Party Validation.
A critical analysis of the system revealed that the perception of the model as an integrated system was far from the reality for the reasons:
• The project monitoring remained limited to physical construction of buildings at sites and could not provide substantial monitoring on the diverse range of program which were progressively launched. A parallel monitoring mechanism was implemented by the regional affiliated offices for their internal use whereas progress reporting continued to be the main responsibility of program officers and planning experts at regional and district levels.
• Internal audit worked independently and reported to the CEO and the Chairman, who then instructed the Finance Wing and Legal Wing to take action on particular cases.
• External audit conducted by the Auditor General’s office, focused only on financial matters and reported to the CEO, Chairman, Board and the Council.
• Impact assessment was conducted on a localized manner initially, but could not fetch any useful information as to draw generalized conclusions.
• Third party validation discussed at length and due to its costly nature could not materialize for some time. Otherwise also M&E documentation required for third party validation was not prepared.
So it appeared that according to the analysis, the model could not be called integrated but complementary at best. The two components internal and external audits had no practical input into the monitoring. Whereas the other two impact assessment and third party validation were not yet implemented. It left with one component of project monitoring.
Besides, the nature of the program dealing with a large number of affected population and huge investment of donor funding remained in public eye so as to mounting pressure for displaying high performance, quality of work and transparency.
On the basis of above analysis, the author sat down to redesign the system and came up with a model composed of parallel streams and not hierarchy of components as follows:
First question to address was to set the object of the M&E and how to address it through the model.
The objective of any M&E was to have timely, accurate and meaningful information for decision making at various levels of management. So the parallel streams were identified as follows:
Stream I: Planning Wing and regional affiliated offices– for information on strategies, work plans and progress reports
Stream II: Finance Wing, Internal Audit & External Audit – for financial information and funds management
Stream III: M&E Wing, MIS and Knowledge Management Cells – for project monitoring, statistical information and program review, respectively.
Stream IV: Media - for keeping up with public opinion and sharing information.
The paper provides a comprehensive analysis and graphical models how the above streams come together as a whole to fulfill the needs of information and ensure cross checking of social and financial transactions. It draws some conclusions at the end.
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