An instrument to monitor progress on recovery programs’ efforts

Everyone is asleep in their beds, it’s the middle of the night and suddenly at 3.32 am all hell breaks loose. No one living in and around the central Italian city of l’Aquila will ever be able to forget that terrible night ten years ago: 6 April 2009. The symbol of that tragedy is still there, the students’ home where eight youngsters died when it collapsed in a devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake that killed a total of 309 people, injured 1600 and displaced 80,000. The city of l’., the capital of the Abruzzo region, today remains practically deserted with very few people having been able to return to their old homes. The historical city is an empty box where very little commercial activity takes place and the former population has become accustomed to living in the ‘new towns’ made up of buildings and temporary homes which sprung up or were made available not far from the old city when the disaster struck. (…) An entire generation of students never set foot in their old schools again. L’Aquila today continues to be a huge construction site with cranes and dust everywhere. Progress has been made but particularly for official state buildings work has been very slow. (…) Ten years on there are hopes that this will one day be possible again.

(Radio France Internationale, Italian City of l’Aquila still rebuilding ten years after deadly earthquake)

Recovery from a massive disaster is a long-term process. Bringing a city devastated by such calamity back to it’s initial state means proper planning, funding, strategic intervention on physical infrastructure, access to utilities, rebuilding of residential areas and a lot of work. It is basically starting from scratch in each of these situations. The chaos and the dynamic nature of such crises leaves room for a lot of key investments. Funds are easier to access in the aftermath of such a disaster and people understand the need to support the efforts of giving someone their home, school and hospital back as quickly as possible. However, such chaos and impromptu action, as everyone feels the pressure to recover as fast as possible, also leaves room for bad investment and rash decisions, embezzlement of funds and more.

AfterMath is a monitoring and visualization tool that allows for people to follow and also report on the progress made on recovery efforts. As the months and years go by, the promises made by authorities, builders and planners should be kept under the radar and the community should also have a way on reporting on delays, bad practices or any inconsistencies they observe. Empowering communities with instruments that help them keep the authorities accountable contributes to better and faster recovery from disasters.

“An entire generation of students never set foot in their old schools again.”

Radio France International wrote in 2019, ten years after the l’Aquila earthquake.

Monitoring recovery implementation plans is very difficult, however it is necessary for two major reasons: (1) to be able to learn from successful or failed implementations to do better in the future and (2) to be able to hold the responsible entities accountable for what they promise to do as many people depend on the fast delivery of results in such cases.

How it works: 

The AfterMath platform allows for configuration of indicators to monitor in a recovery process. These indicators can be tailored to any specific situation (for example: number of residential buildings consolidated after the quake, number of new buildings, number of rehabilitated schools etc) Aside from permanent monitoring of official reports and news on the topics of this work, citizens also have the possibility to report on progress or delays.

For example, the platform allows you to visualize a page with all the ongoing construction sites. A user can submit images and information about a construction site if they pass by and want to report on the status of the building. This alows for multiple data entry points on each consolidation or rebuilding project and empowers people to contribute to a successful reconstruction.

Advocacy NGOs in turn can both report or make use of the data to analyze the performance of the overall intervention or to press for faster or further development in key areas.