In response to the call by the United Nations Secretary-General (after his visit to the three highly hit countries) to begin preparation for Ebola recovery alongside the ongoing emergency response, the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Bank, in collaboration with a range of partners including the African Development Bank, the Mano
River Union, the Economic Community of West African States and the African Union, propose to undertake an Ebola Recovery Assessment (ERA) with a view to building the foundations for short, medium and long-term recovery. This exercise will be owned and led by the three governments in the affected countries, both in the additional field work that may be required, and in the design of national recovery strategies drawn from the assessment reports. It will recognize the continuing emergency and the need to prioritize the response effort. At country level, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinators, the World Bank Resident
Representatives and the European Union Ambassadors will jointly serve as direct counterparts to the Government in the design and implementation of the ERA and its outcome in each country.
Drawing on a range of completed and ongoing assessments and recovery strategies by the governments and other development partners, the ERA will be mostly a consolidation exercise, with brief field missions to fill jointly identified information, resource and capacity gaps, and to engage with national authorities and key response actors on the ground. The ERA will be framed through a resilience lens. It will involve rigorous analyses that go beyond needs identification to understanding the drivers of fragility and vulnerability that caused, or worsened the impacts of the Ebola crisis, as well as the broader risk landscape including health, governance and conflict risks within countries and the Mano River sub-region as a whole. Its analyses, policy recommendations and actions plans will be organized around four broad thematic areas namely i) health, water and sanitation; ii) socio-economic revitalization; iii) infrastructure and basic services; and iv) peacebuilding, institutions, and core-government functions. These are underpinned by crosscutting themes including risk and fragility, resilience, women and youth, and urbanization.
The outcome of the assessment will contribute to the efforts of the Governments of the three countries to design their respective recovery strategies. It will also inform increased global advocacy for support to Ebola-related recovery in the countries concerned by the UN
Secretary General, the Peacebuilding Commission, the World Bank, the European Union, the
African Development Bank, and other development actors.
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1.1.
Current Situation
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of 30 December 2014, the total confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of Ebola Virus disease (EVD) in the three highly hit countries of Liberia,
Sierra Leone, and Guinea was 20,129 of which 7,879 had died.
1 This rapid and unprecedented spread of the virus is closely associated with the mobility of communities, driven by social networks that traverse national borders as well as socio-cultural practices, involving close physical contact with the sick and deceased. In the early stages of the epidemic the EU rightly observed that the EVD outbreak was hitting countries that were already fragile and therefore the impact of the epidemic could be disastrous in the economic, agriculture and food security, trade, education, and health sectors, with a high risk of political instability. As indicated below, this observation is becoming a reality:
 UNDP’s socio-economic impact monitoring exercise reports that livelihoods of individual households and communities have deteriorated, as large segments of the active population, including unskilled youth have lost employment. Agricultural fields have been abandoned in the most affected rural areas; the prices of food and other essential commodities have soared (although recent FAO and WFP reports indicate that local rice prices are in seasonal decline and imported rice prices are stabilizing); and fear, stigma, and limits on national and international travel and trade both within and between the three countries have severely curtailed economic opportunities and destroyed jobs.
 The World Bank has projected a bleak economic future for the countries. In its two (lower and high case) scenarios, the Bank estimates that the economic cost of the crisis in the three countries could amount to between USD 3.8 and USD 32.6 billion.
2 The low case scenario assumes infection continuing into 2015 but remaining at 20,000 while the high case scenario assumes infection rising beyond 200,000. The current status of the epidemic has already surpassed the lower case scenario. In either scenario the social and economic impact could significantly undermine, if not wipe out, social, economic, peacebuilding and to some extent political gains that these countries have made since the end of the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the difficult political transition in Guinea.
Regionally, the prospects for West African economies has already been revised downward. With low levels of growth and unmanageable fiscal deficits, countries in the region might find it difficult to recover speedily from the economic impact of the outbreak.
 On the social front, women and children, including female-headed households are experiencing some of the worst impacts. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports that women account for 55 to 60 per cent of the infected population, due to gender-based norms, gendered divisions of labour within households, and women’s traditional roles in the most affected countries. Women’s roles as front-line health workers and caregivers for family members have also brought them into direct contact with the virus. In addition, women and girls’ access to and use of otherwise lifesaving reproductive health services is reduced due to the crisis, leaving pregnant women at high risk and exposure to infections in health facilities.
1 According to WHO and US CDC in December 2014 (these numbers do not include those in other countries besides the three most affected, Mali - 8 cases, 7 deaths; Nigeria - 20 cases, 8 deaths; and Senegal - 1 case. This figure also includes 4 cases in the USA and
1 in Spain).
2 http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/10/08/ebola-new-world-bank-group-study-forecasts-billions-ineconomic-loss-if-epidemic-lasts-longer-spreads-in-west-africa
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 Many schools have closed indefinitely. UNESCO reports that as of December 2014, some 4,413 schools in Liberia were still closed leaving 1.4 million school-aged children without access to education, while some 1 million learners were still missing school in Sierra Leone. Reminiscent of the war in Liberia and
Sierra Leone, when schools were closed for many years creating a huge generation gap, there is a risk of very high school drop-out rates particularly among girls when schools eventually reopen. This could undermine the countries’ efforts to invest in the future of their young people and as a result swell the ranks of unskilled youth populations which, given the lack of economic opportunities and decent employment, may become alienated and restive. Social stigma of affected families, orphans, survivors and responders, could undermine the already fragile post-war social cohesion in and across communities.
 The most affected sector is the health sector. Already with very limited numbers of health care personnel before the crisis, the countries have lost over 300 health workers to the virus.
3 The majority of health care personnel are women, challenged by unpaid care for infected family members while at the same time facing increasing work burdens. Additionally, the lack of adequate regulation for the disposal of Ebola-infected bodies in the early stages of the crisis could result in a heightened risk of health and sanitation related challenges in the immediate future.
1.2.
International Response
Since the outbreak, the international community, including UN agencies, the World Bank, the IMF,
European Union, the African Development Bank, bilateral partners, and non-governmental organizations, has responded with a range of support activities including raising awareness of, and mobilizing communities; providing health care workers; resourcing the health system to scale up through payments of decent wages, hazard pay, and incentives for health care and other Ebola-response workers, providing equipment and supplies, building and managing treatment centres, safe management and disposal of medical waste, etc.
On 18 September 2014, the Security Council determined that the Ebola outbreak was a "threat to international peace and security" and unanimously adopted Resolution 2177; and on 19 September, the
General Assembly adopted resolution 69/1 on measures to contain and combat the Ebola outbreak. The
Resolution welcomed the SG's intention to establish the first-ever UN emergency health mission
(UNMEER). The Secretary-General followed up the Resolution with the establishment of UNMEER with a time-bound crisis response mandate to help stop the outbreak, treat the infected, ensure the availability of, and access to essential services and prevent outbreaks in countries of the region that are currently unaffected. Also, ECOSOC in its Special Meeting on, “Ebola: A threat to Sustainable Development”, held on
5 December 2014 called for more resources to strengthen national institutions, prioritizing the public sector, including health, education, sanitation and the economy, so as to safeguard affected countries against future crises.
4
As hopeful signs of the decline of the infection and death rates appear, the Secretary-General, on 12
December 2014 issued a letter, calling on the UN system and the international community to begin preparing for a comprehensive and coherent recovery effort for the three most affected countries in close collaboration with the Mano River Union, the Economic Community of West African States, and the African
Union Commission. In the same vein, the Chair of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) in a letter to the
Secretary-General dated 25 November 2014, conveyed a request from the PBC and the Permanent
3 Duff, M. & DiLorenzo, S. Associated Press. ‘Ebola takes big toll on already poor health care’. 30 August 2014. http://news.yahoo.com/ebola-takes-big-toll-already-poor-health-care-151913199.html
4 Further details on the ECOSOC Special Meeting are available at http://www.un.org/en/ecosoc/ebola1/.
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Representatives of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, to assess the impact of the Ebola epidemic on
“security, local governance, political institutions, social cohesion and economic recovery, taking consideration of a comprehensive regional and longer- term approach and recommend practical steps for institution-building to ensure that the peacebuilding gains in the three countries are not reversed.” The
PBC’s call for a focus on peacebuilding, security, and institution-building is to ensure that recovery assessments pay attention to areas that are traditionally less emphasized in such post-crisis assessments, possibly leading to a different kind of support from the UN system and the international community as a whole, and mobilizing resources over the medium and longer term to support recovery in the three countries.
In order to ensure timely and coordinated follow-up to the above decisions, the Secretary-General tasked the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), working with the UN Development system, to lead this effort to support the governments of the affected countries. UNDP would undertake this task in consultation with the Economic Commission for Africa, the World Bank, the African Union, the
Peacebuilding Support Office, the Office for ECOSOC Support and Coordination, United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, and all other relevant UN entities and regional multilateral partners. The Secretary-General followed this up with an agreement with the Chairperson of the African Union Commission on 22 December, to convene an
International Review Conference on Ebola in March 2015—to be coordinated by the Office of the Special
Adviser on Africa (OSAA).
Prior to the Secretary-General’s letter, technical staff of UN agencies, the World Bank, and the EU, under the leadership of the Post-conflict Needs Assessment (PCNA) and Post-disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA)
Advisory Groups, had met and agreed on the need to undertake an Ebola Recovery Assessment (ERA), conceived as a synthesis and gap-filling exercise—building on the wide range of impact monitoring and recovery planning exercises that had been, and continue to be undertaken by the Governments of the three countries, as well as by a number of agencies since the EVD outbreak. The meeting emphasized the need for the ERA to start by consolidating and analyzing available findings from these assessments, in order to identify possible gaps and the most critical areas for targeted recovery support that will contribute towards more resilient communities and institutions in the three epicentre countries. The ERA will build on ongoing recovery planning initiatives being undertaken by the partners (EU, WB, UN, AfDB) with relevant government counterparts in the three countries.
The overall aim of the proposed Ebola Recovery Assessment (ERA) is to identify critical areas for recovery interventions that will help lay the foundations for more resilient social, economic, and governance systems particularly in basic service delivery and core government functions—health, education, rule of law, local governance, social cohesion, psychosocial support and livelihoods, etc.—and design integrated national and regional recovery frameworks and action plans that are inclusive and gender-responsive, multi-sectoral and strategic, addressing equally the needs of the affected population. The ERA will provide further analysis on security and political institutions, as requested by the PBC.
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Specifically the ERA will seek to:
2.1
Consolidate the range of Ebola-related assessments and analyses carried out to date in the three countries and the West Africa sub region, and develop a synthesis of critical resilience-based recovery challenges and opportunities that could serve as a baseline for national and regional recovery frameworks and plans of action, emphasizing investment in the use of national systems, building upon ongoing efforts, and national and local leadership and coordination;
2.2
Determine the scope, resource needs, timeline and key actors for recovery and socio-political stability to ensure that there is strong international commitment to adequate financing and technical and political support to preparedness to deal with future health crises and consolidate recovery and peacebuilding gains, to enable a quick return to sustainable development pathways in the countries concerned;
2.3
Support nationally led recovery coordination platforms under the leadership of the national governments, with clear articulation of roles, responsibilities and accountability mechanisms that will bring all stakeholders together, including the international community, around common and inclusive nationally led recovery strategies and programmes for each country, with tailored recovery strategies for the main urban centres, and at regional level as needed;
2.4
Provide concrete recommendations in consultation with and with the participation of affected women and men, civil society and community based organizations on how to address the gaps and challenges and practical steps to ensure that peacebuilding gains in the three countries are not reversed;
2.5
Map existing donor’s commitments and ongoing activities beyond the humanitarian phase to the recovery phase and design a financing and resource mobilization advocacy strategy in support of the
SG’s International Conference on Ebola Recovery and the advocacy work of the leadership of the EU, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank.
The ERA will be conducted through a resilience lens anchored on human rights to ensure immediate recovery and longer-term ability to prevent and respond to future shocks while continuing to prioritize the ongoing emergency medical response. It aims to identify factors that will enable communities and societies to effectively resolve the current crisis; learn from the experience to strengthen their collective problem-solving capabilities; become more cohesive communities with strong state-society relations; have strong and responsive institutions; and ensure that there are effective risk management architectures including health, food security, and conflict surveillance systems. The resilience-based ERA approach will take a comprehensive, long-term, and transformational view, going beyond traditional needs assessment to include rigorous analysis of:
 Recovery capacities and skills as well as institutional options for recovery in the affected countries;
 Structural factors that perpetuate vulnerability of people and communities, gender inequality, and the fragility of institutions and systems, including political and security institutions—especially those whose capacities have been significantly eroded by the EVD outbreak; and
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 The risk landscape with emphasis on the health and sanitary risks in the immediate future and other medium to long-term horizon risks, including violent conflicts and economic and financial stress that could potentially impact the recovery process.
3.1
Rationale for a Consolidated Resilience-based ERA
The preference for a synthesis rather than a separate heavy assessment exercise, and for adopting a resilience-based approach anchored on human rights, is justified by the following reasons:
3.1.1
Already available multiple assessment reports and growing assessment fatigue: The Mano River basin countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone have undergone multiple assessments carried out by the governments and a large number of international agencies covering many of the critical sectors affected by the EVD crisis. The governments’ assessment and planning exercises and reports have already led to the formulation of national recovery strategies in Liberia and Sierra
Leone. Among other assessments are: i) the monitoring and assessments of health systems by
WHO; ii) UNDP’s socio-economic impact assessment that provides regular real-time updates of the evolving impact; iii) the ECA economic and social impact analysis that extends beyond the three countries to look at the implications for West Africa and Africa as a whole; iv) the World Bank’s prognosis exercise and October 9 th launch of its Economic and Social Recovery efforts; v) FAO and
WFP food security assessments; vi) UNICEF’s assessment of basic service delivery particularly education and sanitation; vii) UNESCO’s Ebola response strategy that includes assessments of impacts on education; and viii) assessments conducted by national and international NGOs, etc.
These assessments have all provided significant information from which to develop a synthesized consolidated recovery assessment report. The added value of the ERA will be to distil the findings in the reports in order to identify opportunities and likely gaps for a resilience-based recovery framework and define a coherent approach through which the international community could be mobilized to support nationally-led early, medium and long-term recovery in the three affected countries as well as in the sub-region.
3.1.2
Dedicated focus on the current governance and institutional context: The Mano River basin countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have been the subject of international engagement in the last 15 years, beginning with peacekeeping efforts, to peacebuilding and support to their overall sustainable development programmes. Despite the progress achieved particularly prior to the Ebola epidemic all three countries are on the agenda of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC). The PBC and various entities have sought to consolidate peace through institution building and to enhance the cohesion of societies. A closer look at the evolving developments in these countries and their long-term peacebuilding priorities and challenges should help the government, civil society, the private sector, and the international community determine the specific areas of focus in the areas of security, local governance, political institutions, social cohesion and socio and economic recovery that should be highlighted and brought to the attention of the international community.
3.1.3
Exposure of critical degrees of fragility: The rate at which the Ebola outbreak quickly turned into crisis in the Mano River basin countries is a strong indication that these post-conflict countries continue to be characterized by critical levels of fragility in their respective systems. As members of the g7+ (a network of countries that have self-identified as fragile states) Liberia and Sierra Leone have conducted assessments of their socio-economic and political systems for areas of fragility which carefully analysed institutions in the justice, revenue, and security sectors as well as political culture. Both assessments will be vital to understanding why the institutions of governance particularly the governance of the health sector collapsed so quickly under the weight of the
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outbreak and why there were such considerable challenges in state-society relations that impeded a proper response to the crisis and a timely mitigation of its impacts. Such reflections will help the countries to reassess and reset some of their post-war peacebuilding and-rebuilding priorities to achieve more resilient societies as well as well-grounded and responsive institutions through the recovery effort. Similar assessment of systems in Guinea will provide a comprehensive picture for the three countries and the implication of the MR region; and
3.1.4
Seamless interaction of crisis response and recovery: The EVD, though showing signs of slowing down, is still raging in the three countries. The UNMEER’s crisis response tasks are still active along with a range of emergency responders. As explicitly indicated in the letter of the Deputy Secretary-
General, recovery planning efforts should not divert from the current ‘stop and treat’ efforts, which remain the core priority at present. UNMEER is undertaking an Overview of Needs Requirement
(ONR) to: i) revise the appeal from 988 million USD to 1.5 billion; (ii) reassert the ‘stop and treat’ strategy as the overall response framework with prominent attention to the Essential Services component (based on early recovery approach); and (iii) ensure a better articulation of the coherence between the immediate response and the recovery phase.
Figure 1: Interconnection between the Ebola Response, Essential Services and Recovery
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As indicated in Figure 1 above, the simultaneous work on the revision of the Overview of Needs and
Requirements for the Ebola Response (ONR) and the Ebola Recovery Assessment (ERA) provides a unique opportunity to ensure a coherent transition between the immediate life-saving response and recovery. The ERA design process will explicitly build on the outcomes and lessons learned from the implementation of the ONR so far, exploring how to take to scale gains made in the health, education, sanitation, employment, social protection and livelihood sectors. It will also draw upon the political support of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the Ebola crisis. Emergency responders and the ERA and ER design actors will constantly speak to each other to determine shifts in interventions through a shared understanding of existing capacities, the risks in the horizon, and the risk management capacities of the countries concerned.
4.1
Scope of the ERA Process
The ERA will essentially be a synthesis and consolidation exercise, drawing on the entire range of ongoing or completed assessments by the governments and development partners cited above, and filling gaps where needed through short field missions to the three epicentre countries and the Mano River basin region. Although the EVD crisis has affected every development sector in these countries it will be difficult to find all the resources needed to address every single challenge simultaneously. The ERA will therefore aim to identify in close consultation with, and under the leadership of the governments and participation of the private sector and civil society, including women’s organizations and leaders, the most critical sectors where there will be a need to deepen the assessment.
Drawing on existing recovery strategies and assessments conducted by the three governments, the letter of the PBC Chair to the SG, the letter of the President of ECOSOC to the SG, and at a multi-partner meeting organized by UNDP on 23 December 2014, the following four broad thematic working groups are proposed for organizing the ERA:
 Health and Water and Sanitation (WASH): The current crisis is a result of the state of the health sectors and systems in the three countries. The health sectors are underfunded and highly centralized with services skewed in favour of capital cities. These factors helped accelerate the breakdown of the health systems under the weight of the outbreak. The assessment will among others explore urban and rural health services, the environment, community based health care systems, and water and sanitation. The assessment will also capture essential public health functions that have a regional linkage/networking capability.
 Infrastructure and Basic Services: The mass movement of Ebola-infected rural populations to the capital cities was primarily due to limited and non-existent health centres in many rural parts of
Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. This lack of infrastructure and services contributed to the devastating impact of the disease in rural communities. The ERA will assess availability and access to health services including conditions of roads between people and health posts; the quality of health service infrastructure and infrastructure needs; inadequate supply chain and logistics; availability of energy and connectivity particularly in health posts and for other basic services; and social welfare and social protection especially of vulnerable groups.
 Socio-Economic Recovery: Considerable work has been done on the social and economic impact of the
EVD outbreak, notably on social protection systems, employment, livelihood, trade and commerce,
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financial services, tourism, agriculture, food security and nutrition, micro, small and medium enterprises, and the overall macro-economic health of the affected countries.
 Peacebuilding, Social Cohesion, Institutions and Core Government Functions: The three epicentre countries have recently emerged from conflict, with Liberia and Sierra Leone recovering from civil wars that spanned a decade and Guinea emerging from a turbulent political situation. The three countries as indicated earlier are on the PBC Agenda with concerted efforts being focused on rebuilding institutions in the political, security, rule of law, and economic arenas. The ERA will assess the degrees of fragility that still exists in these critical institutions and how such fragility contributed to the EVD outbreak escalating to crisis levels. It will assess institutions that account for core government functions, civic engagement and state-society relations, and social cohesion within and across groups, and determine ways in which they can be strengthened for improved resilience to future shocks.
Figure 2: ERA Thematic Working Groups
The four thematic areas will be underpinned by rigorous analysis of the following cross-cutting themes:
 Urbanization: For the first time in its 38 year history Ebola spread from the rural to urban centres with devastating consequences. In line with UNMEER's assessment, the complexity of the urban areas requires a tailored approach. The capitals are dominated by a mostly informal urban economy, with strong linkages with rural areas and a wide variety of neighbourhoods reflecting the socio-cultural and ethnic diversity of the region. Urban slums pose particular challenges in terms of ensuring resilient recovery as they are characterized by chronic and structural vulnerabilities (including poverty,) and inadequate basic services and sanitation, and are often disconnected from state authorities. Specific urban recovery frameworks will reflect the need to integrate sectoral responses, address the complexity of the urban areas, and acknowledge the crucial role of city governments, in enabling the wide variety of urban stakeholders.
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 Risk and Fragility: Fragility is defined as the failure of an institution or system to deliver on its core function. This could be due to a combination of factors including lack of capacity, exclusionary policies, a history of mistrust between people and their government, disruptive practices of individuals in the system, among others. The EVD outbreak has disrupted systems in the affected countries and exposed their fragility to other shocks. In addition, so many unconventional approaches have been used in the desperate attempts to stem the tide of the EVD. No one can predict the side effects of those experiments on the overall health conditions of the population in the future. There are also sanitation risks particularly in urban slums that will need to be monitored and addressed. The ERA will aim to assess the degree of fragility in the critical systems including health, education, livelihood, employment, and local governance systems that have a direct impact on the resilience of communities and their exposure to risks of future shocks and stresses. It will also explore the feasibility of establishing community-based, national, and MR basin regional health surveillance systems to complement already existing climate, disaster, and conflict risk surveillance systems in the countries and region.
 Resilience: The EVD outbreak is characterized not just by tales of tragedy but also of heroic individual and community efforts. Amidst the crisis, doctors and health workers have managed to organize in these countries new systems for ensuring payment of wages to health workers posted in rural communities. Ambulance service and community-based and mobile health systems are emerging out of the crisis. The ERA will identify and analyse these emerging resources and capabilities across the four thematic areas and explore how to take them to scale and sustain their use.
 Women and Youth: UNICEF reports that women are the worst affected by EVD outbreak considering their traditional role of care-giving to the sick. But women are also showing strong resilience in the face of the crisis despite their disadvantaged positions. The ERA will assess all sectors in the four thematic areas using a gender lens to better understand the exposure risks women face, the impact of the outbreak on women’s livelihoods and household chores, and emerging opportunities to build on the resilience of women. It will also focus attention on livelihood and employment opportunities of youth that have been affected by the outbreak and explore ways to accelerate their restoration.
Overall, the ERA will aim to recommend priority interventions that will have a catalytic effect and lay strong foundations for resilience and strategy for mobilizing resources including financial, technical and knowledge as well as political support to implement the priority interventions.
4.2
Methodology
A short conceptual framework will be shared for the discussion and adoption by the Thematic Working
Groups to ensure consistency and coherence in sectoral and overall analyses. The ERA will utilize qualitative and quantitative methods to consolidate existing findings on impacts, needs, capacities, opportunities and challenges, and elaborate risks through the following process:
 Methodology Design: Once the Technical Task Team (TTT) is constituted it will define the broad framework for the ERA including definitions, core questions, and how to link the thematic working groups and their respective sectors in a synthesis report;
 Desk Review: The methodology design will be followed by a desk review and consolidation of existing assessment reports relevant to the EVD crisis, and the identification of information gaps that will need to be filled through additional collection or targeted field work. Each Thematic working group co-leads will coordinate the desk review and consolidate the findings for their
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respective thematic working group in close collaboration with the relevant agencies and submitted to the overall ERA coordinator;
 Consolidation of thematic working group reports: The ERA coordination team, with the support of the agencies, will organize the thematic working group reports into a draft consolidated synthesis to be reviewed by the TTT;
 Field Mission: Based on the desk review and gaps identified, a field mission will be undertaken.
The mission will enable the ERA teams to engage with the governments and civil society organizations and obtain their guidance, commitment and ownership. This will be followed by a gap-filling fieldwork, building on ongoing dialogue in the countries with national authorities and partner institutions of this exercise;
 Validation: The TTT will undertake a validation exercise on the outcome of the ERA together with governments, civil society and the private sectors of the three countries, MRU, ECOWAS, and the
AU with the participation of civil society and the private sector. The validation exercise will enable the three governments to review and validate the full report to be submitted to the UN
Secretary-General and the EU, WB, and AfDB leaderships (and shared with the PBC and ECOSOC, the African Union, the MRU, ECOWAS, and the IMF leaderships).
The ERA process will aim to achieve the following time-bound deliverables in three phases:
Phase 1:
(1) Engagement with governments to obtain their support and ownership as well as the support of regional organizations (MRU, ECOWAS, and the African Union) on the conduct of the exercise;
(2) Engagement channels established and operational between the external ERA partners and key government institutions and civil society of the three most affected countries, including women organizations and leaders, as well as the PBC membership to provide support based on the present TOR, obtain guidance on national priorities at the technical and substantive level, and to ensure their full national leadership of the formal ERA multi-partner assessment on the ground;
(3) Agreement reached on the composition of an ERA Technical team reuniting technical agency staff, on an ERA framework and methodology, and on the critical sectors that are most likely to be the focus of the assessment;
(4) Indicative or mid-way report produced following the desk review exercise by the Technical
Task Team, identifying risks and opportunities for recovery; critical sectors for prioritization of interventions; an integrated recovery and peacebuilding framework; a nationally driven coordination architecture; and critical gaps that need further exploration and analysis, with specific attention to gaps on gender disaggregated data or gender-based information in general, as well as age and other socioeconomic categories;
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Phase 2:
(5) Multi-partner follow-up field assessment mission to the three countries, the Mano River
Union, and ECOWAS (where feasible) to produce a consolidated field report that: i) presents and analyzes the needs and feasibility of recovery; ii) outlines support to national ownership and leadership of the recovery process; iii) defines the role and space for private sector and civil society participation in the recovery process; and iv) defines national and regional recovery support, monitoring and reporting mechanisms;
(6) 3-4 page contribution to the UN Secretary-General’s statement regarding progress on the recovery planning process to the African Union Summit on 31 January 2015. This is a UN focused deliverable. The WB, EU and African Development Bank will also draw on these initial findings for related advocacy work by their respective leadership;
Phase 3:
(7) Support the Governments to develop and/or strengthen their respective national recovery strategies drawing on the assessment report and recommendations on a recovery framework that will provide a basis for resource mobilization;
(8) Based on these national recovery strategies, an overall Ebola Recovery Framework developed to be discussed and agreed with the governments of the affected countries as they relate to their specific national recovery strategies, and by relevant regional organizations (ECOWAS,
MRU, AU) as they relate to regional and sub-regional strategies; establish country based mechanisms, led by government and supported by the EU, UN, WB and the thematic working groups;
(9) Financing architecture and strategy developed in close consultation with the Governments of the three countries, key partners and donors, and regional/sub-regional organizations— drawing on a donor Ebola recovery financing opportunities, and taking into account already existing resources provided or pledged by the Governments and development partners. This will be informed by mapping of existing resources and commitments already made by donors to Ebola response and recovery;
(10) Focused reports for the PBC developed and submitted to the UN SG—to inform his response to the PBC’s request of 25 November on the epidemic’s impact on security, local governance, political institutions, social cohesion and economic recovery, taking into consideration the regional and longer-term approach, as well as including an explicit gender perspective, and present it to the PBC (a UN specific deliverable that will be drawn from the overall report);
(11) Support provided to the global advocacy effort for Ebola-related recovery, including through targeted working documents to support the organization of a dedicated global conference to be organized by the Secretary-General and the African Union with support from other international partners;
(12) Focused report produced for the EU 3 March Ebola Recovery Conference with updates including among others, the results of the resource mapping exercise and endorsed by the partner countries with a 1 page summary per country; and
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(13) Final ERA Report developed and submitted to the leaderships of the multi-partners (UN, EU,
WB, and AfDB) and shared with the Economic and Social Council to inform the Council’s mid-
2015 follow-up meeting on the EVD crisis.
The technical work of the ERA technical team will be organized under the existing post-crisis recovery assessment and planning tripartite partnership framework of the UN, WB and EU, expanded to other key partners in the UN, WB, EU as well as the AfDB. It will be organized with the following structures:
Overall Coordination: The expanded partnership will be facilitated by an overall Recovery Coordinator from
UNDP who is the Deputy Director of UNDP’s Bureau for Policy and Programme Support. This role is primarily a convening and facilitation function. The coordinator will be supported by a team of experts.
Specifically, there will be a gender expert nominated by UN Women and the UNDP Gender Team to undertake gender assessment of the impact of Ebola, participate in country visits and consultations as appropriate and ensure that gender aspects are integrated into the country and consolidated report.
Supported by support team including consultants, gender expert from UN Women and UNDP the role of the Coordinator includes:
 Facilitating multi-partner senior level meetings for decision-making;
 Consolidating reports from the thematic working groups drawing on his back-up support for the consideration of the partners; and
 Lead field missions in close consultation with the other three partners to the affected countries and region. The Coordinator in consultation with the core partners will streamline country missions to small manageable teams so as not to overwhelm national authorities and impede the ongoing emergency medical response. The small missions are also justified by the fact that all the key partners already have teams in these countries and are engaged in various recovery planning exercises that this exercise will build upon.
Technical Task Team: Each agency and partner involved in the ERA will nominate focal points/experts it intends to make available full-time for the ERA TTT process including work in the specific thematic working group(s) or area(s) to which it will be contributing. Based on this information, and in consultation with the agencies concerned, partners at a meeting proposed thematic working group leads and co-lead agencies as indicated in Figure 2. The leads and co-leads constitute the core ERA Technical Task Team (ERA/TTT).
Throughout the ERA process, Thematic working group leads and co-leads will consult closely with, and benefit from the technical and material support of all actors that have a mandate and/or technical expertise in specific thematic working group-related areas to ensure that all strategic areas are properly covered. Each working group is also encouraged to ensure there are cross-cutting experts supporting their teams throughout the exercise.
The TTT will meet as regularly as possible in New York and other capital locations as necessary, as well as work virtually during the entire process to ensure that the tasks identified are undertaken in a coordinated manner and within the tight timeframe dictated by the urgency of the recovery effort. It will among other things undertake the following:
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 Design the ERA framework and methodology in close consultation with relevant agencies and national institutions including agreeing on the critical sectors in each thematic working group and how to weave in the cross-cutting factors;
 Undertake desk reviews of assessment reports including those on the cross-cutting themes;
 Conduct scoping and gap-filling fieldwork in the three countries and the regional and subregional dimensions;
 Produce mid-way and final reports with recommendations for developing national recovery frameworks.
National Level Coordination Support: At the country level the national governments will lead the overall coordination of the exercise but the multi-partner ground support for the ERA will be coordinated by the
Resident and Humanitarian Coordinators and the UN Country Teams in close cooperation with the WB, EU, and AfDB country leaderships. The National Level Coordination Support will among others:
 Directly engage and support the national level leadership and coordination efforts ensuring all relevant institution of government is well consulted and a national coordination mechanism is in place building on what already exists;
 Organize relevant HQ TTT and Senior Coordinator’s field missions to the respective countries including organizing mission programmes, engaging relevant stakeholders to ensure their participation, facilitating access to relevant data and reports of members of the UNCT, WB, EU, and the AfDB;
 Support national governments in the design of their recovery strategies building on ongoing initiatives and ensure these are fully aligned with national development plans; and
 Support preparatory efforts at national levels in anticipation of global advocacy activities including the SG’s and AU’s March proposed Ebola Recovery conference.
Task Timeline
Dec
Terms of Reference Early Recovery Assessment
Composition of ERA Technical Team
Desk Review and Initial ERA report
Field Mission to 3 Countries, UNMEER, MRU, ECOWAS & AU
Contribution to SG’ Statement to AU Summit
X
X
X
Jan
X
X
X
Feb Mar Apr
Finalize report for SG’s response to PBC request (UN only deliverable, drawing from the overall ERA)
Final ERA Report
X
X
Urban/capital, National (urban/Rural/community) and Regional
Recovery Frameworks (to be recommended in the final ERA report with design led by national governments)
Ebola Recovery Financing Strategy
X
X
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