4.8 Construction

It is unusual for CARE to carry out major house building programmes. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Lack of available funds
• With limited funds, the significance of a housing programme is reduced and normally limited to a small targeted beneficiary group.
• The economic benefit normally goes to a large contractor often outside of the disaster affected area.
• Quality is difficult to assure.
• It is difficult to build-in DRR and resilience, or to improve the capacity of the local builders.

If construction is deemed appropriate then there are different delivery options, each with a variety of pros and cons. These should be carefully evaluated:

• Direct labour – CARE will act as the contractor.
• Community labour – the community is responsible for the delivery.
• Contract labour – normally a contractor from outside the affected community.
• Self-build – this has similarities to self-recovery programming.

In all cases, it is considered preferable that an ‘owner-driven response’ is used.