From July to August 2014, Gaza witnessed fifty-one days of hostilities, one of the most destructive intensification of conflict since 1967, resulting in an unprecedented scale of destruction and displacement. At the height of the conflict, almost 500,000 people were internally displaced. Significant damage to housing and infrastructure as a result of the conflict, blockade and escalations of hostilities over the past six years caused large-scale impact to the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ (OPT) economy and productive assets.
In view of informing the 2017 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), the coordinators of the humanitarian shelter response, Shelter Cluster Palestine and local authorities, requested REACH to lead an evaluation of the progress of the shelter response since the 2014 hostilities in two phases: a qualitative participatory evaluation through a secondary data review, a lessons learned workshop, an online survey, and purposively sampled key informant (KI) interviews, conducted in July/August 2016; a quantitative evaluation through statistically significant primary data collection at household level which will take place in November/December 2016.
Read the Lessons Learned from the Gaza Shelter Response here.
Key findings from the qualitative evaluation indicate relative improvements in the coordination of the shelter response framework compared to previous responses and since August 2014, enabling timely emergency shelter assistance through the Emergency Operation Center and IDP Working group, facilitating sharing of information on damage and shelter needs and a smooth transition between emergency and recovery programming. However, a number of challenges emerged: KIs and workshop participants explained that, while well perceived during the emergency phase, inter-actor coordination was thereafter compromised during the early recovery response phase. A lack of clearly agreed key terminologies between humanitarian actors, such as common definitions of “households”, “family” or “housing units” and a common understanding of “IDPs” in Gaza, had a critical negative impact on the subsequent planning and implementation of the assessment. Equally, the housing damage assessment suffered from gaps in the process itself of data collection and in the type of information collected: the lack of data on socio-economic indicators and on existing housing condition was pointed out, for the assessment only focused on damage sustained by the housing units.
With concern to the shelter response per se, by August 2016 about 50% of households who endured minor or major housing damage had received cash for repairs. However, only 31% of households from the severe and total damage caseload had received such assistance. Reasons explaining this slow pace included: information gaps from the housing damage assessment combined with the weak monitoring culture of shelter assistance; weak strategic prioritisation of vulnerable groups; and a lack of communication with local communities.