Student Title:
Giathi, Durrani OL 341 Assignment 1
Student Date:
Feb 2, 2013
Giathi, Durrani Project OL 341 Assignment 1
Online Learning: OL 341 From the Ground Up for Adaptation
Center for Sustainable Development: http://www.csd-i.org/
Assignment 1. What’s the real problem?
In the month of September 2012 floods hit Pakistan for the third consecutive year affecting more than 5 million people. Among the most affected provinces, masses
of Balochistan stands high in number of people effected, infrastructure destroyed and losses to livestock and standing crops. District Naseerabad and Jaffarabad
sustained more damages in all field of life. Thousands of people lost their houses, livestock and crops and are forced to live in temporary shelters, solely depending
on aid provided from government and humanitarian organizations. An assessment was conducted with 25 participants comprising of 15 male and 10 Female. Using
the 10 seed technique each of the participants was able to identify their needs and prioritize them using the 10 seed vote. The 25 participants belonged to district
Jafferabad,. The needs they identified included Shelter, food and water and farming inputs to start earning their bread and butter. The needs identified are expressed
by ten seed method as follows.
List of the needs/problems and the vote results.
Votes out of 150
Session with 15 Male participants
Homes destroyed and people living in tents.
Food shortage with food stocks having been lost
Loss of livestock which are a livelihood source; providing milk and dung used as fuel.
Safe drinking water
Inability to buy farm inputs such as fertilizers and seeds
List of the needs/problems and the vote results.
Session with 10 Female participants
Homes destroyed and people living in tents.
Food shortage with food stocks having been lost
Livestock Loss of livestock which are a livelihood source; providing milk and dung used as
fuel.
Lack of household items such as Cloths/Bedding/mats, kitchen utensils
50
30
22
14
34
Votes out of 100
30
16
18
36
Following the floods, a multi-sector initial rapid assessment took place and emergency humanitarian response carried out by various humanitarian organizations.
This project therefore follows the humanitarian emergency interventions with the aim of looking at recovery of the communities towards sustained livelihoods and
development.
Simple project outline of problems/causes/impacts:
Problems:

Lack of Shelters, people living in open / tents.

Food shortage
Causes:

Floods washed away crops

Inability to replace farm inputs washed away by floods
New underlying cause related to climate change that I added to the outline since the community did not identify one. This underlying cause is also a
contributor to chronic under nutrition—so it allows me to include a climate change related underlying cause that also targets one of the community identified
needs.

Climate variability causing extreme weather events such as flooding
Their negative impacts:
The destruction of sources of livelihood and insufficient income we to extreme poverty. Standing water and living in the open lead to malaria and pneumonia in
both children and adults leading to a dependency syndrome in the community which would continue to rely on humanitarian assistance and also reduces the
ability of adults to lead the productive, meaningful, prosperous lives they need to leave the cycle of poverty, to recover from destruction of the floods and
contribute to the sustainable development of their communities.
Problem Statement:
100 families in the Union counsil Dera Allah Yar, Jaffarabad, Pakistan are suffering from lack of shelter (families are living in the open or in tents) due to climate
change related flooding, and are suffering from shortages of food due to crops washed away by floods and an inability to replace farm inputs that were washed away
by flooding. The destruction of sources of livelihood and insufficient income we to extreme poverty. Standing water and living in the open lead to malaria and
pneumonia in both children and adults leading to a dependency syndrome in the community which would continue to rely on humanitarian assistance and also
reduces the ability of adults to lead the productive, meaningful, prosperous lives they need to leave the cycle of poverty, to recover from destruction of the floods and
contribute to the sustainable development of their communities.
Adaptation. Short summary of climate-related underlying cause to community identified problem. Floods are one of the signs of climate
variability and change. With floods comes mainly destruction that affects various sectors. Adaptation aims to reduce to negative impacts or to realize
opportunities linked with climate change. Using various community participatory tools there would be need to enhance the community’s capacity to
adapt to climate variability and change.
Forum Discussion Report. I posted a brief description about who I am, what I do and why I’m taking the course. I did not need any advice from
classmates about an adaptation component for my project outline—so I didn’t post a question plus there were no posts from 2013 session to reply too.
Good Morning Team Pakistan,
I hope you are looking forward to a wonderful week.
Excellent job on your first assignment. Gold stars all around!
Please note: this e-mail note is included in the attachment called "assignment one with comments" in order to make
it easier for you to read, copy and paste ideas.
Although you did a very good job I'm going to make a couple of suggestions—I hope that they are helpful.
Problem Definition:
I'm going to suggest that we move malaria and extreme poverty down into negative impacts and replace them with the
two top things on your needs assessment: housing and food. In the needs assessment that you sent poverty and health
weren't specifically mentioned so this will keep the project outline consistent with the needs assessment. Also, I'm not
trying to diminish the importance of those two things – and I'm not deleting them – just shifting them around a bit.
Underlying Causes:
I moved the "lack of shelters" underlying cause up into the problem area. I'm going to take part of the sentence from the
"extreme poverty" and add it into the underlying cause area "inability to replace farm inputs washed away by floods.
I shortened the climate variability underlying cause up a little bit
So now by looking at the rearranged problems and causes you have two distinct problems that are directly linked to
three distinct causes.
Negative Impact Statement:
The negative impact statement was good – I simply added in the things that we moved from above
Problem Statement:
The problem statement is meant to be simply the logical accumulation of the problems, the underlying causes and the
negative impact—simply collapsing the outline as it is written into a single short paragraph.
So I copied the problem, causes, and negative impact statement, and pasted them into the problem statement so that
they were all absolutely parallel and equal to each other.
Hints for Assignment 2:
I’m going to paste in some solutions below that past students have used successfully. Feel free to use them, modify
them or develop your own solutions instead.
So, for example, you could include or modify something like the following program outline in your assignment two:
[Problem 1]. Lack of Shelters, people living in open / tents.
Advocacy Program for Government/INGO Housing Support [solution to underlying cause: Lack of Shelters, people living in open / tents]:
[Activity 1]. Facilitate the organization of a community Advocacy Program committee
[Activity 2]. Consultation with advocacy expert to develop a participatory process and committee training program
[Activity 3]. Advocacy Program committee develops an advocacy plan in order to work together with the authorities on the provision resilient housing.
[Activity 4]. Advocacy program: Make an official claim to the Government/INGO authorities asking to include on the budget the provision of resilient housing
Community-Based Flood Mitigation and Adaptation Program [Solution to underlying causes: Lack of Shelters; Climate variability causing extreme weather events such as flooding]:
[Activity 1]. Community-based workshop and survey with community members to identify their knowledge of risk, vulnerability, and traditional coping techniques for floods.
[Activity 2]. Form Flood Preparedness and Risk Reduction Committee to coordinate activities during flood disaster
[Activity 3]. Training program for committee leaders
[Activity 4]. Community workshop on hazard data collection and risk assessments techniques such as participatory mapping, Participatory Vulnerability and Capacity Assessments
(consciousness raising)
[Activity 5]. Community workshops on participatory flood early warning and flood contingency planning.
[Activity 6]. Program on access to timely and reliable information and forecasts on the possible occurrence of natural calamities
[Activity 7]. Community workshop and training participatory flood early warning and flood contingency planning
[Activity 8]. Community workshop and training on life saving skills
[Activity 9]. Community workshop and training on opportunities for flood mitigation
[Activity 10]. Flood Preparedness and Risk Reduction Committee develops a risk reduction and flood and preparedness plan
[Problem 2]. Food shortage.
Climate Smart Agricultural Practices Programme 2 [solution to underlying cause: Floods washed away crops; Inability to replace farm inputs washed away by floods
]:
[Activity 1]: Surveys and interviews to collect traditional knowledge on agriculture, changes in agricultural cycles, vulnerabilities and coping strategies
[Activity 2]: Identify expert specialist/extension agent in soil, water and agriculture to design and facilitate participatory workshops
[Activity 3]. Community workshop on participatory mapping of water and land resources and uses, agricultural challenges and vulnerabilities—and degraded hotspots
[Activity 4]. Extension agent visits most affected farmers to identify exact CC impacts to crop production and needs of farmers to adapt to flood
[Activity 5]. Design program to equitably provide agricultural inputs (payments over time? Government support? Micro credit NGO? Village Bank Revolving Account?)
[Activity 6]: Develop plan that combines resilient and improved agricultural techniques with traditional knowledge for an overall improvement in productivity
[Activity 7]: Establish pilot plots demonstrating better cultivation practices
[Activity 8]: Conduct Farmer workshops on soil restoration and conservation techniques
[Activity 9]: Conduct Farmer workshops on water harvesting, conservation and management techniques
[Activity 10]. Workshops on crop diversification and drought resistant crops.
Please look at the attached student program example sheet too. There might be program ideas that better fit your specific
context.
Moving forward to Assignment 2.
If this is acceptable to you, please move forward to assignment two. If this is not acceptable, that is fine, simply send me
your amended Assignment One marked “Final”.
In moving onto Assignment Two, please follow my example as your template and don’t change this final outline from
Assignment One. This is strictly copy and paste from Assignment 1 to Assignment 2.
I also need to make sure that the three of you are participating in the forum, Facebook, and the Development
Community—and I don't see mention of this at the bottom of this assignment.
NB: I copy/pasted this information from a number of sources so fonts and formatting vary--and there may be typos too.
It will save me a ton of time if you can just fix/reformat the things you like to be equal to each other in Assignment 2.
Thank you!
Thank you for the good job that you did—it certainly makes my job more enjoyable.
Sincerely,
Tim