The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance has launched a new guidance document to help practitioners use the data gathered through the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities to plan appropriate, community owned, interventions. This blog explains why, how, and where to learn more.
The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) tool has been applied in almost 200 communities around the world, gathering extensive data on flood resilience.
So…what are we doing with all this data?
The results from the FRMC informs some innovative academic research on community flood resilience. But aside from this? How do we use the information gathered through the FRMC to concretely improve the lives of those in vulnerable communities?
This is not an easy question, especially as the FRMC provides us with multiple survey results, dozens of indicators, and both quantitative and qualitative information for each community. One can get lost in the density of data, or pay too much attention to specific details while forgetting the big picture. Another pitfall is that of assuming that the information generated is too complex to be understood by the communities and stakeholders that you’re working with.
This is why the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance has just published a guidance suggesting steps to achieve a comprehensive (but not overwhelming!) data analysis leading to intervention planning.
How will the guidance in “From results analysis to intervention planning” help?
The guidance, although targeted at FRMC users, asks key questions that can be useful for any team who wants to translate their data into actions:
- Is the information that we have gathered enough?
- Are we measuring the right things?
- Are the results consistent with our existing knowledge of the community context? If not, what could be the reason(s) for this discrepancy?
- What information should we share, with whom, and how?
- How do the results in the different indicators relate to each other? And how could the community’s strengths be leveraged to improve its weaknesses?
- How do we transform data into intervention brainstorming, selection and planning?
- Are we prepared to do things differently or will we just use the information to justify a “business as usual” approach?
The guidance proposes easy activities to be first performed internally, with the data collection team; followed by activities which allow you to share and discuss the information with communities and relevant stakeholders… in order to eventually achieve a participatory planning process.
Having the data is not the end of the journey, but rather the exciting beginning of a new one!
More reading
Find out more in our new guidance From results to intervention planning. And to learn more about the FRMC tool and read our other guidance documents have a look at our dedicated FRMC page.
Comments