Context Overview
From July to August 2014, Gaza witnessed fifty-one days of hostilities, one the most destructive intensifications of conflict since 1967. This resulted in an unprecedented scale of destruction, devastation and displacement. At the height of the conflict, almost 500,000 people were internally displaced. The concentration of damage was mainly found along the Armistice Line, however multiple districts located beyond this line had a vast majority of structures completely demolished.
Significant damage to housing and infrastructure as a result of the conflict, combined with nine years of blockade and three major escalations of hostilities over the past six years, caused large-scale destruction to Gaza’s economy, productive assets. In March 2013 Gaza was already facing a housing shortage of around 75,000 homes1 . Data collected during the final housing damage assessment from this conflict established that 11,000 housing units were totally destroyed, 6,800 with severe damage, 5,700 with major damage and 147,500 with minor damage. Of these, a total of 17,800 housing units were estimated to be uninhabitable.
Over the past two years, donors and aid actors have made significant efforts to provide humanitarian shelter assistance to the affected population in Gaza, although a number of challenges, gaps and blockages remained. To coincide with preparations for the 2017 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), the coordinators of the humanitarian shelter response, Shelter Cluster Palestine and local authorities, requested REACH to lead a review and evaluation of the progress of the shelter response since the 2014 hostilities.
Methodology and Objectives
The objective of the evaluation was to measure the outcomes of the provision of emergency, temporary and durable shelter assistance, to better understand the key achievements; establish best practices; identify residual response gaps; and draw lessons learned and recommendations. The evaluation process has been divided into two phases: (1) a qualitative participatory evaluation through a secondary data review, a lessons learned workshop, an online survey, and purposively sampled semi-structured key informant interviews; (2) a quantitative evaluation through statistically significant primary data collection at household level. This report is the result of the first phase of this evaluation.