Resilience of Displaced Urban Community Survey in Garut Area

In order to improve research related to the resilience of urban displaced. Last month, the RDI team conducted a View from the Front Line (VFL) survey in Garut Area. The VFL survey wants to highlight the views of the most vulnerable and marginalized populations through qualitative and quantitative approaches. This survey was part of assessment in the project "Making Displacement Safer: Locally-led DRR Solutions for Displaced Population in Urban Areas". The project will be led by the Global Network of Civil Society Organizations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR) and will be funded by the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA). Resilience Development Initiative (RDI) Indonesia as a member of GNDR will further implement the project to better understand the risks of displaced communities and to formulate mitigation strategies based on it with the local approach. The VFL survey was conducted on 29 - 31^th March 2021 for the Preliminary Engagement, and also conducted on 19^th May - 25^th May 2021 to do the Data Collection.

The aim of the VFL survey is to capture the threats, consequences of those threats, actions needed and the barriers faced to displaced communities while they inhabit the displacement locations. In Indonesia, the displaced were caused by disasters, the flash flood of the Cimanuk River in Garut (1.5 - 3 m high) caused more than 2.525 people to evacuate. The government had provided the displacement locations to the communities. This survey was held by RDI as implementer of the project, which was represented by Dana and Medhiansyah as Project Officer. However, there were several people who also assisted the survey, such as local officers from Garut which consisted of one facilitator, five enumerators and one data manager. The local officer helped the RDI Team to deliver the information from the displaced communities and also became liaison for RDI because the communities tend to speak the local language. Furthermore, the communities were more open and comfortable, if they interviewed using local language.

In conclusion, the results of the survey include several things, namely there is information about how much damage and impact from the 2016 flash flood to the displaced population. In addition, there is new information and insight regarding the displaced community in Garut such as: the communities' characteristics, backgrounds, livelihoods, economy level, challenges, and problems. The result also has confirmed the number of displacement locations. There are ten (10) locations ending three (3) additional displacement locations from the previous information total of seven (7) locations. It can be learned that not all the communities have moved to the displacement site. Some of them are still living in the flood zone because they are still having a property asset. Furthermore, most of them still have a work or source of income in the city centers which means it is located near the flood zone. Lastly, the survey team also got an overview of the stakeholders that will be participating in the View from Frontline (VFL) lite and Urban Living Lab.

However, the team also experienced several challenges in conducting the survey, such as huge numbers of displacement locations; each location has a quite far distance for each other, ranging from urban (urban-rural setting) to peri-urban (rural setting). The difficulties in accessing some of data related to the displaced population such as the number of communities for each relocation site, the number of communities who inhabit the relocation sites or back to their old homes (flood zone), future for the displaced population, etc due to the lack of data management in local stakeholders. Also, due to many displacement locations, the team has difficulty determining the communities' representative numbers/proportion of each location (418 participants). It also becomes the issue in implementing the Urban Living Lab regarding the communities' numbers of each location that should be considered to participate in the discussion.