The impact of the typhoon, including a massive 5-6 metre storm surge, killed over 6,000 people and displaced more than 4 million people within the Philippines.The Operational Peer Review (OPR) was carried out in January 2014. It focused on four key areas:
- Leadership
- Humanitarian Programme Cycle
- Coordination
- Accountability to affected people
The OPR team included representatives from OCHA, Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), UNICEF, UNDP, and UNHCR. They conducted meetings, workshops, and interviews with almost 200 people from the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), clusters/sectors, humanitarian actors, donors, and national counter-parts. Field missions were undertaken in Tacloban city and Guiuan, where the team met with front-line humanitarian practitioners, local authorities, and people affected by the crisis.
The OPR commended the overall effectiveness of the response. The team recognised that the Transformative Agenda (TA) protocols facilitated large-scale rapid deployment of highly qualified and experienced personnel. The civil-military coordination was considered as a best practice, both with international and national counter-parts.The team worked with the HCT to develop an action plan that set out actions required to strengthen the response. Some key actions include:
- The need for stronger engagement of the HC with the inter-cluster group, in order to bring the strategic level of the response closer to the operational level.
- The development of humanitarian transition plans for the clusters and organisations, ensuring more engagement from national actors and responsible transfer to recovery.
- The prioritisation of gender concerns.
- The need to build on local civil society capacities.
- The importance of building on good practices for coordinating ways of working.