Associate Awards, Leveraged and Complementary Activities

4. Associate Awards, Leveraged and Complementary Activities

In March 2005, URI received an Associate Award—the Post-Tsunami Sustainable Coastal Livelihoods Program in Thailand—under the SUCCESS Leader Award and USAID country Missions are also supporting and funding complementary activities in Tanzania and Ecuador. These are considered leveraged and complementary funding for SUCCESS activities. The goal is to secure additional associate awards, which would provide opportunities for additional engagement by the family of SUCCESS partners. The LWA Associate and non-associate USAID supported activities in SUCCESS countries are outlined below. Performance management and reporting on USAID indicators and Life-of-Program LOP indicators for the Leader award do not include data from associate awards. Such data is reported to the Missions issuing the associate award with copies furnished to the cognizant technical officer CTO for the SUCCESS Leader Award. Following is a summary of past and projected Year 3 results for the Thailand Associate Award. 4.1 Thailand Associate Award The Post-Tsunami Sustainable Coastal Livelihoods SCL Program is an innovative model Program to demonstrate how coastal communities that can build their resilience to economic and environmental shocks. It was created in response to the December 26, 2004 tsunami disaster through a US 3.26 million SUCCESS associate award funded by the USAID Regional Development MissionAsia RDMA. The goal is to rebuild and diversify sustainable coastal livelihoods of severely affected fishing communities on the Andaman Coast of Thailand and to demonstrate effective practices for building and strengthening community-based disaster preparedness. The program is implemented in partnership with the Asia Institute for Technology AIT and the University of Hawaii-Hilo. The program ends on March 31, 2008. The SCL program seeks to build coastal community resilience through an approach that focuses on rebuilding the economic basis of livelihoods rather than on physical reconstruction. A key feature of such resilience is the emphasis on building livelihood opportunities that do not degrade the natural environment, and that protect the ecosystems, reduce vulnerability to natural hazards, and strengthen local governance. Program interventions combine ICM and hazard management frameworks. It emphasizes providing coastal people with the skills and resources for self-recovery. Program objectives are to: • Establish a common vision and coordinated approach to rehabilitation • Restart and diversify livelihoods, especially those that rely on healthy coastal resources • Build capacity for planning and decision-making in the coastal zone • Promote learning and share experience in Thailand and the region Selected program highlights in Year 3 include: • Opening of the Kamphuan Community Learning Center KCLC featuring the KCLC Tsunami Museum with touch screen computer kiosks • KCLC made operational: equipment, directorstaff, business plan • Community level evacuation drill completed • Analysis of data and report of findings from second socioeconomic assessment and livelihood and microfinance assessment • Study tour for microfinance village committee members to observe Cooperative Banking systems in Nakorn Srithamarat and Surathani provinces • Exchange visits between Thailand and Indonesia The project has faced numerous challenges including as program close out approaches. First, creating a foundation under Thai law to provide an autonomous body to oversee the long-term governance and fiscal management of the Kamphuan Community Learning Center has been more difficult and time consuming than anticipated. Secondly, financing a program of activities through the Learning Center after the project 48 ends with a revenue base generated mainly from the services it can offer is not considered feasible and the operations will likely need some level of base support from the Tambon local government budget. Lessons learned from this program include: • Rural communities struck by natural disasters have a unique context for development work. Disaster breaks down social capital and multiple and uncoordinated post disaster relief efforts create confusion in rural villages making it difficult at the onset to build a common vision and work with local leaders • Community credit schemes, if done well, can be successful, reduce a family’s economic vulnerability, and help support the reestablishment of livelihoods • Increasing livelihood diversity requires long term investments in training, extension and start up capital The SCL field office will close at the end of the first week in September 2007, at which time field staff contracts also expire. The Bangkok project office will remain open through February 29, 2008 end of no- cost extension period and the project Chief of Party and administrative assistant will continue working on the project part-time through that time. Extension project elements that incur costs will end on February 29, 2008 to allow time to close all financial accounts before the end of March. The project legacy includes the Learning Center and numerous and valuable extension materials in Thai for community use. 4.2 Leveraged and Complementary Activities The SUCCESS Program has leveraged over a half million dollars US for its activities see page 64 for more detail. An interesting example of this is the leveraged funding being secured by other donors and programs interested in the SUCCESS Certification Program models in the Latin America and Western Indian Ocean regions. In the former, over 60,000 is being provided by the Avina Foundation and LOICZ, and in the latter, a similar amount is being provided by the Swedish International Development Agency SIDA and the European-Union funded Regional Coastal Management Program ReCoMap. The SIDA funds are already committed, while the ReCoMap funds are verbally committed but awaiting agreement between WIOMSA, CRC and ReCoMap as to which specific activities of the initiative are best funded. Equally impressive is the over US 4 million that has been secured and that clearly complements— sometimes building upon, sometimes feeding back to—SUCCESS funding and activities. This includes but is not limited to: In Tanzania, the USAID Mission funds a broad portfolio of ICM activities being implemented by the Tanzania Coastal Management Partnership TCMP and which compliment those of SUCCESS. This includes but is not limited to activities in biodiversity conservation; microenterprise development; small- scale, sustainable, native species mariculture; developing and disseminating good practices; influencing policy; etc. In Ecuador, the USAID Mission provided funding directly to EcoCostas for mapping the Cojimies watershed as well as tapped EcoCostas and CRc expertise to assess its portfolio of Galapagos activities. In addition the PMRC national ICM agency has funded Ecocostas to conduct a water quality study in the Cojimies Estuary, a SUCCESS Program site; and the European Union-funded Prodonera project is funding the reforestation of the coastal forest that is also part of the SUCCESS work site area. Meanwhile, in Nicaragua the SUCCESS partner UCA has secured funding from a range of private sources as well as international bi-lateral development agencies for work on issues around shrimp and cockle farming—two issues also being addressed by SUCCESS. UCA-CIDEA and UHH have also partnered to expand water quality and sanitation efforts with funds leveraged from the AquaFish CRSP program. 49

5. Program Management