The Lessons Learnt Review Meeting of the joint National Program on Strengthening Capacities for Disaster Risk Management (DRM) was held in Tehran on 12 January 2010. The Meeting sought to achieve a common understanding of the lessons learnt from the program among the program stakeholders and beneficiaries. It also aimed at improving consolidation, accomplishment, and sustainability of the program results, particularly through institutionalization of the program outputs/outcomes in the National Disaster Management Organization (NDMO) and other end-user agencies.

The key stakeholders provided further inputs on lessons learnt including the overall significance of the Program and relevance of its objectives; efficiency of the programme plan, implementation and resources in achieving the objectives, and sustainability of the end-results. The participation of provincial officials and experts was a major element.

The session opened with remarks by the Vice-President and Deputy of NDMO for Prevention, Mr. Shishegar who highlighted the noteworthy value of the program outputs, particularly the Information Portal and DesInventar, and their outstanding alliance with the national needs in disaster risk reduction. He also announced the replication and institutionalization of the two outputs/outcomes in the NDMO system nationwide. Mr. Shishegar also announced that the Program will be extended by the end of 2010, during which the responsibility for its management will be officially shifted from SPAC to NDMO.

Another key speaker of the event was Ms. Behnaz Pourseyed, National Project Director (NPD), who emphasized in her statements the value of review-meetings in documenting the lessons learnt. Citing a number of the key achievements from the SPAC’s viewpoint, she listed greater focus on prevention, team-work and inter-sectoral coordination against a large range of the programme activities, capacity development among young  project personnel, and strengthened capacities for documenting the extracted standards from the programme as the most important achievements of the Programme. In the end, she suggested that a nation-wide seminar be held for wider advocacy of the achievements, results and extracted standards of the Program.

The representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Mr Karimi praised the ownership at the national level among the partners to the project from the Government, despite the ups and downs any development-related project may have to stand. He underlined the sensitivity of disaster risk management and hoped that the project will be extended for another year at the end of the agreed timeframe. Mr. Karimi also hoped that, considering the fact that Iran is prone to many natural disasters, further new projects would stem out of this project. He also emphasized the importance of wider sharing and advocacy for the   programme achievements at the national and regional levels, replicating the programme results through all nine regions throughout the country. He also highlighted the need for stronger transparency and careful planning as well as the pressing need to address the high level of risk in Iran, through preparing further proposals.

Ms Elzira Sagynbaeva, Deputy of UNDP Resident Representative, underscored the Programme in her remarks as ‘an example of extraordinary government ownership and support towards the joint DRM program’. However, she pointed out the setbacks during the Program as ‘natural issues’, which normally occur in any development program of similar scale and extent. She referred to the agreement made for a one-year extension, in order to enable the executing and end-user agencies to consolidate, sustain and institutionalize the Program results. She strongly supported the need for wider advocacy and sharing of the Program achievements at national level.

Reviewing Lessons Learnt

The meeting was facilitated by Dr. Victoria Kianpour, UNDP Programme Analyst, who wrapped up the discussions by presenting the following key conclusions:

Under component one:

1-      the strong relevance, added-value and significant  progress in achieving the expected outputs and outcomes, especially in establishing the historical national disaster loss data bank called DesInventar;

2-      strengthening the capacities of key stakeholders in analyzing the relations between the trends of disaster risks and development processes through developing  national analytical reports about disasters risks based on  DesInventar and other sources;

3-      facilitating access to knowledge and information for disaster risk management by developing the National Portal for Natural Disaster Risk Management.

Under component Two:

4-      certain extent of progress made in strengthening capacities of key players in Urban Earthquake Disaster Risk Management, raising public awareness and education;

5-      community-based natural disaster risk management;

6-      school and Hospital safety, and last but not the least,

7-      gender mainstreaming.

However, the participants agreed that much more has to be accomplished in finalizing standard operating procedures for developing earthquake scenario, preparedness and response plans in cities.

Furthermore, the participants concluded that more effective interventions could have been carried out to standardize the development of integrated, comprehensive Urban Earthquake Disaster Risk Plans, as well as in improving construction processes, extracting benchmarks, standards and the minimum requirements for urban risk management, should international expertise had been outsourced as per the programme design.  UNDP- Iran reassured continued offers to support the relevant pilot projects.

However, the participants also agreed that a key lesson not materialized in this regard was the cost-sharing by the Government that resulted in allocation of national resources to child projects and activities under Component Two, with less strong linkages/alignment with Component One, as well as the overall programme design that was financed mainly by UNDP TRACK I & III resources.

As a result of the evaluation carried out by the participants through a questionnaire, 66% of participants was found to believe that the meeting achieved its set of results ‘partly to completely’ and 86% scored the facilitation as ‘very satisfactory to good’.

42 Key partners to the Program participated in this one-day meeting, which was chaired by Disaster Rick Management and Recovery Programme Analyst, Dr. Victoria Kianpour. The participants represented various sectors, such as the Strategic Planning and Control Office (SPAC) in its capacity of the executing agency, National Crisis Management Organization (NCMO) of the Interior Ministry in its role as senior end-user, Governor General Offices for Disaster Management and Reconstruction, municipalities of the program pilot cities, Kerman and Gorgan, Education, Health and Housing Ministries, Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS), Association of Engineers, and Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting Organization (IRIB). In addition to UNDP-Iran’s DRR, Head of the Energy and Environment Program Cluster, Mr. Mehdi Kamyab participated in this event.

Further Information on the Project

In recognition of Iran’s status as a disaster-prone country with high risks, the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) of Iran in 2005-9/10 prioritized strengthening capacities for Disaster Risk Management as a key programming area. Consequently DRM is strongly reflected in UNDP-Iran’s Country Programme Action Plan (CPAP) 2005-9/10.

In pursuit of common objectives as listed in CPAP, UNDP-Iran and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran developed a Joint National Five-Year Programme for Strengthening the Capacities for Disaster Risk Management (2005-9), which aims to strengthen disaster risk management capacity including enhanced community awareness and participation, as well as enhanced coordination mechanisms among all stakeholders at local and national levels.

The project implementation started in early 2006 with a range of national partners and UNDP providing technical support and co-sharing of the funds, in addition to their capacities of quality assurers.

The intention of the project is to translate the national Disaster Risk Management policies into local and intermediate level practices towards sustainable risk reduction. This concentrates on reducing the risks associated with earthquakes in urban areas, growing access to information on DRM in Iran, and contributions to sub-regional knowledge network on DRM.  The present project initiated a pilot earthquake risk management program in two sample cities, Gorgan and Kerman. The pilot project os expected to subsequently be replicated in other cities across Iran.

A national level plan and strategy document is to be developed and applied to the intermediate and local levels, and to be combined with a demonstration exercise for earthquakes in the two demonstration cities. Moreover, a process of creating minimum requirements for urban disaster risk management will be carried out to employ these pilot projects to standardize and regulate building norms and standards across the country.