The Caritas India’s humanitarian response for the flood affected people in India has significantly impacted the lives of troubled families, says official evaluation team of Caritas Internationalis.

The evaluation team including George, Emergency Response Officer from CAFOD and Irene from Humanitarian Department of Caritas Internationalis visited Bihar and Northeast to evaluate the relevance, effectiveness, coverage, accountability, coordination and sustainability of the response to identify lessons for the continuing programme (with a specific emphasis on WASH).

Caritas India asked for the technical accompaniment from the CI Accountability Sector Working Group- SWG and the CI WASH SWG to carry out a Real Time Evaluation of the Emergency Appeal in order to assess the impact of the response to date and inform the upcoming implementation phase. It will help Caritas India to consider lessons learned from the response for future Caritas India responses.

Disaster create multi-dimensional impact and irreparable damage on affected people at physical and psychological level and Caritas India goes beyond disaster by giving them the dignity of life, says Fr. Frederick D’Souza, Executive Director, Caritas India during the final day of RTE held at Faridabad on December 13, 2017.

Setting the expectation of the real-time evaluation, Fr. Paul Moonjely, Assistant Executive Director, Caritas India shared that it is a stock taking exercise to look back and introspect our intervention. He added that Caritas India USP is reaching first to the unreached and the evaluation will help us to reflect the aspect of compassion by adding innovations.

Caritas India supported affected population with food, livelihood, water, sanitation & hygiene, cash, health, education and shelter.

The evaluation team conducted Focused Group Discussion (FGD) with community, Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) with Caritas India staff, implementing partners and external stakeholders to identify and validate finding by triangulation.

The team mapped the intervention on the parameter of relevance/appropriateness, coverage, participation, feedback & complaint, information sharing, coordination, sustainability and programme and management effectiveness, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH).

The findings revealed that overall humanitarian response was in-line with Caritas India’s capacity and all relief items were used adequately by the community and WASH trainings before the distribution was useful for the community.

It also pointed out that in terms of coverage, hard to reach areas were reached with relief materials to the most vulnerable population and targeting areas were well coordinated with other stakeholders.

One of the initiative of complain mechanism was appreciated with the comment to strengthen the complaint handling mechanism by ensuring greater awareness and accessibility of the community to the system.

Appreciation was given on the programme & management effectiveness for responsiveness, rapid deployment, well-managed distribution, harmonised M&E system and non-biased post distribution monitoring (PDM). To strengthen the effectiveness, it was suggested to improve the qualitative monitoring by sharing the behavioural change monitoring of WaSH and PDM results with partners.

The Internationalis team conducted exercise for the Caritas India Humanitarian Response Team to rank their priority based on the current implementation and identify recommendation for immediate implementation and for consideration at a later stage.

Caritas India team also developed action plan to improve the current programme with clear lines of responsibility and deadlines with specific, realistic and time bound parameters.