Response to Cyclone Nargis poster - Innovations fair

Empower the survivors
On May 2nd 2008, Cyclone Nargis hit the coastal delta of Myanmar killing over 150,000 people and severely affecting 2 million more. The brief period of creative chaos which followed in the wake of the storm, and the slow start of the international response allowed a number of innovative products and processes to be developed that focused on supporting the massive autonomous relief intervention of local civil society. These attempted to combine rapid and flexible systems for grant disbursal with initiatives for simultaneously developing, or at least protecting, existing capacities of CSOs. The experience demonstrates that appropriate systems for supporting a civil society response to rapid-onset emergency can enable very fast and sensitive relief at scale, with greater penetration and at much lower costs than conventional direct implementation by international agencies.