# Community Partner

Ashoka

Disaster response

Local Leadership: All the Work, All the Criticism

Kevin Lee

Contributor

Local Leadership: All the Work, All the Criticism

Local and international groups worked together to aid Palawan communities devastated by Typhoon Odette

Lifechurch Philippines

Ashoka Fellow Kevin Lee of A Single Drop for Safe Water (ASDSW) reflects on the power of local humanitarian leadership, following the relief efforts ASDSW and Roots of Health, another Ashoka Fellow-led NGO, helped coordinate in Palawan last December.

Barangay captains are the first responders in the event of a disaster. They are officially recognized as leaders of the community and are the government’s duty bearers for providing response and relief services while also coordinating with non-government agencies. They are much maligned and often accused of favoritism but in reality, they do respond with the resources that they have.

Imagine this – you are a marginalized community, maligned by the public, often ignored by the government at all levels, and living in survival mode even before the typhoon. The Badjao Community of Barangay IV (a peri-urban barangay) in Roxas, Palawan is one such community of 74 households sustained by deep-sea fishing. In the community, the Chief is the informal barangay captain responsible for the overall welfare of the community, including trying to work with the government and the owners of the land they are currently residing in, and resolving conflict within the community.

Typhoon Odette (Rai) forced the community’s evacuation to the Municipal Hall last December 2021. They returned to find their houses severely damaged and their fishing boats destroyed.

The Chieftain MR Mokmin Abdul now faced a situation where he had to help his community eat, rebuild its shelters, and fix their boats all through outside assistance from government and non-government agencies. When A Single Drop for Safe Water (ASDSW) and Roots of Health (ROH) were assessing the damage and designing their response in the weeks after the typhoon, Barangay IV Roxas was identified, along with another Badjao community in Barangay I, as the only peri-urban community needing assistance.

With the Chieftain’s help, a Water Bladder was installed along with temporary toilets – equipment suWith the Chieftain’s help, a Water Bladder was installed along with temporary toilets – equipment supplied by UNICEF to the local government and cash for work supplied by Arche Nova and Oxfam – for hygiene promotion. For the first time since the typhoon struck, the community had access to sanitation facilities and sufficient safe water. The 10,000-liter bladder would be emptied in hours as the community took advantage of the availability of water. At this stage, ASDSW & ROH worked with the Chieftain, landowner, and the Roxas Water district to facilitate the connection of the water district to a common tap stand. The community understood they must pay for the tap stand and they gladly raised the money, noting that they get water at rates that are 100 times less than what they had before. The toilets are still being used and are kept clean and the community is working out how to install more permanent facilities.

InIn addition to this, A Single Drop for Safe Water (ASDSW) and Roots of Health (ROH) continued to work with the community to meet their pressing needs: cash grants were provided funded by UNOCHA; sakoline, nails, and other tools were provided by ECHO through their REACH project partner Oxfam; and just recently, corrugated galvanized iron sheets and nails were provided through AmCham Foundation funding. The residents of Barangay IV Roxas are rebuilding their community and have been able to return to their fishing, and their Water and Sanitation situation is now actually better than before. They still are advocating for more livelihood assistance to speed up their boat repairs and there is an articulated need to help with child protection and education. ASDSW & ROH are currently looking at a potential partnership with an International NGO to provide local skill-building and start-up support.

With the crisis that this community faced, it could have descended into desperation, conflict, and needless suffering, particularly in the case of women and children. The chieftains who take on an unpaid role in many of our marginalized communities are the focal points for the community and are in fact informal duty bearers. They are also impacted by the crisis and are working to rebuild their own lives with the additional burden of helping the rest of the community.

Chieftain Mokmin Abdul took on this role and worked with other duty bearers to go beyond his community’s survival and actively improve their quality of life.

Informal and formal local leaders are the unsung heroes in the time of crisis, and in reality, have the most impact on the quality of relief and recovery for their local communities. As humanitarians, our job is to empower these leaders in tangible ways and to protect them from stereotypical attitudes, promoting local humanitarian leadership at the most local level.

A mother and her children visit a reconstruction site in Palawan.

A Single Drop for Safe Water Inc. and Roots of Health, as members of the Humanitarian Response Consortium, launched a large-scale response in Palawan on December 18, 2021. UNOCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) provided an emergency cash grant to showcase the localization of humanitarian leadership which supported government agencies, local CSOs (civil society organizations), and vulnerable households. Read the full report here.

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