Background and objectives:

Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar on 2 and 3 May 2008, making landfall in the Ayeyarwady Division and directly hitting the city of Yangon. Around 40 townships in Yangon Division and seven in Ayeyarwady Division were designated disaster areas. It was estimated that over 2.4 million people were severely affected in what was the worst natural disaster in the history of Myanmar, with a death toll of 84,537 and an estimated 800,000 displaced.

Over 450,000 houses, or 45 per cent of the housing in the affected areas, were badly damaged. The overall objective of the project is to maximise the impact of shelter assistance and resources to meet the shelter needs of the most vulnerable populations affected by Cyclone Nargis.

• Monitor the progress of the activities to meet the residual emergency shelter needs.
• Optimise the implementation of early recovery shelter interventions by effectively coordinating recovery response.
• Ensure seamless handover of the cluster coordination and contribute to the seamless recovery.
• Ensure equitable attention to the shelter needs with technical standards, agreed guiding principles, and coherent implementation modalities that promote the principle of “build back safer” and complement government interventions.

Results:
The results achieved have been:

• A facility to support the coordination of early recovery shelter programmes in operation.
• Gap analysis to facilitate equitable attention to the shelter needs particularly for the vulnerable groups.
• Data and information bases created for access by all interested partners.
• Capacity to provide support and referral technical materials.
• Capacity to facilitate consultation on housing designs, technical standards, strategy and implementation modalities in consultation with relevant authorities.
• Availability of monitoring and assessment information system on emergency and early recovery shelter interventions, feeding into the Integrated Monitoring Matrix (IMM) Information Management and linked with the hub coordination team.
• Regional hub level coordination mechanism further strengthened for sustainability.
• Emergency Strategic Framework and Shelter Recovery Strategy followed by shelter partners.
• Mechanisms in place to facilitate voluntary return of the displaced population through shelter assistance.
• Skills upgraded and knowledge transfer to the staff from the organisations working in shelter sector, local authorities, village tracts leaders, carpenters and artisans on technical standards particularly on safer shelter retrofitting and construction.