Part III: Restart¶

Your club has assessed what the disaster broke in your area's economy (Chapter 3). It has decided when to shift from relief to recovery (Chapter 4). It has a filter to avoid doing harm (Chapter 5). One question remains, the one every member asks at the first meeting: what do we actually do?

This part answers with four levers. A local economy holds together through the money that circulates, the skills of the people who work, the markets where people buy and sell, and the places where all of this happens. A disaster breaks all four at once. Recovery means setting them back in motion, with the people who ran them before.

Four levers, five families¶

The CED guide describes five families of community economic development action: microfinance, vocational training, value chains, cooperatives, and integrated local development. This book takes them up and transposes them to the aftermath of a disaster, combining value chains and cooperatives, which play out in the same markets.

Lever	Chapter	What it sets back in motion	CED guide family
Money	6	savings, credit, grants to businesses	microfinance
Skills	7	paid work, training, reconstruction trades	vocational training
Markets	8	farming, fishing, value chains, cooperatives	value chains and cooperatives
Places	9	shops, marketplaces, streets, the local area	integrated local development

The CED guide remains the reference for normal times. Each of the four chapters that follow deals only with what changes after a disaster.

What changes after a disaster¶

Four things change, whatever the lever.

What exists comes before what you create. The shopkeeper, the lender, the cooperative, the training center that were working before the disaster know their customers, and they will still be there when your club has finished. The independent evaluation of an International Labour Organization (ILO) project after Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines reached this judgment: rebuilding existing businesses was "highly cost effective"; creating new businesses required long preparation and, according to the evaluators, had no place in a twelve-month recovery project.

Debt becomes dangerous. Incomes have dropped at the very moment people need to borrow. A loan that is reasonable in normal times can become a trap.

The market can be damaged by aid itself. Chapter 5 showed it: a gift that competes with a local seller delays the recovery it was meant to serve.

Timing rules. Seed that arrives after planting time is wasted. A street that reopens in the tenth month has lost its customers. Building trades training that starts when the construction sites are closing leads nowhere.

The order in time¶

The four levers do not start together, and that is the main difference from normal times. No international standard sets their order. This book proposes a sequence, based on three documented findings.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) describes employment recovery in three tracks that all start early but do not have the same intensity over time (Chapters 1 and 2): stabilizing incomes, very intense at first and then declining; local economic recovery, which rises in the medium term; and sustainable employment, low at the start and growing afterward. The ILO's Recommendation 205, adopted in 2017, takes up this phased approach for disasters.

The FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, writes in its 2017 guidance document that farmer field schools "are not the first point of intervention" (our translation) after a disaster: they can be launched once communities begin to settle and adapt to the post-disaster reality.

In Nepal, after the earthquake of April 25, 2015, a recovery microcredit program run through small farmers' cooperatives disbursed its loans between July 2016 and October 2017, fifteen to thirty months after the shock. New credit, even well designed, arrives late.

From these findings, this book draws three windows. The durations are orders of magnitude, to be adjusted to each disaster.

flowchart LR
    S[Relief<br/>disaster guide] --> B[Shift<br/>Chapter 4]
    B --> P1
    subgraph P[First months]
        direction TB
        P1[Money: the lender handles its clients<br/>savings, bridging support]
        P2[Skills: paid work<br/>with training]
        P3[Markets: plant on time<br/>restore traders]
        P4[Places: reopen the street<br/>temporary shops]
        P1 ~~~ P2 ~~~ P3 ~~~ P4
    end
    subgraph M[6 to 24 months]
        direction TB
        M1[Skills: reconstruction<br/>trades]
        M2[Markets: chains repaired<br/>cooperatives checked<br/>field schools]
        M3[Places: marketplaces reopened<br/>local buying by sites]
        M1 ~~~ M2 ~~~ M3
    end
    subgraph L[Beyond 2 years]
        direction TB
        L1[Money: new credit<br/>through a local lender]
        L2[Markets: cooperatives<br/>consolidated]
        L3[Places: permanent sites<br/>run by local people]
        L1 ~~~ L2 ~~~ L3
    end
    P --> M --> L --> N[Normal times<br/>CED guide]

The first months belong to what already exists. The local lender handles its own clients, savings become accessible again, bridging support flows through financial partners, and paid work puts income back into households and, where possible, a skill. Farmers need to plant on time; traders need a street where customers come back.

From six to twenty-four months, reconstruction is in full swing. This is the window for building trades training, for value chains repaired link by link, for cooperatives whose accounts have been checked, for reopened marketplaces.

Beyond two years come the things that take time and trust: new credit through a local lender, consolidated cooperatives, permanent sites run by people from the area. Then recovery merges into ordinary economic development, the kind covered in the CED guide.

How to read this part¶

Each chapter follows the same path as the earlier ones: a real scene, what it teaches, what the standards say, what the club does, the pitfalls. Each one adds a section to your club's recovery file: money, skills, markets, places. Chapter 9 ends with the timeline of the four levers, which brings these sections together.

You will probably not pull all four. A club of bankers and shopkeepers will choose money and places; a club rooted in a farming region will choose markets. The assessment from Chapter 3 and the filter from Chapter 5 decide. This part gives you what you need to choose, and in what order.