Integrating Relief and Recovery with Effective, Sustainable, Progressive Development in Yemen

Yemen is ranked 154th out of 187 countries in the Human Development Index, a ranking that has generally held steady since 1990. The violence and political upheaval of the past year in Yemen have resulted in large-scale displacement of Yemeni people and deterioration of the Yemeni civil infrastructure. Yemen continues to grapple with the decline of its water resources. In terms of per capita water availability, Yemen is the most water-stressed country in the world and one of the 10 poorest in terms of all available resources. The typical paradigm for international aid tends to divide funds and efforts into three categories: relief, recovery, and development. The international community tends to respond to natural or political disasters with large sums of financial and material aid, which result in no meaningful reduction in vulnerability to the next (and often imminent) crisis. This paper suggests (based upon a case study of a World Food Program food-for-work initiative in Hajja and Hodeidah, Yemen) that investments of labor, materials, and funds in food or financial relief (emergency response) should be coupled with innovative and uncompromising commitment to improvements in Water, Sanitation, and Health (WASH)-related policies, practices (e.g., hand-washing, community-led total sanitation) and infrastructure (e.g., watershed improvements, cisterns, water filters, wells, rainwater harvesting systems, hillside terraces, latrines, toilets, etc.) that result directly in local ownership of greater food security, health, and control of water resources (including invulnerability to and resilience in the recovery from floods and droughts).