After the fire: Data, communities and disaster recovery

After the fire…

When thousands were left homeless after a fire tore through an informal settlement, municipal officials were faced with the urgent task of providing food and shelter to the victims. A longer-term conundrum, of how to fairly allocate new housing to the affected people, was also facing the authorities – especially in a city where so many have nothing to begin with.

In addition to this underlying moral question, the situation also presented a serious data challenge. PwC was able to come in and help deliver a successful solution, while also identifying some ‘best practices’ for dealing with similar problems in the future.

Fire trucks struggle to reach the spreading flames, hemmed in by densely packed homes, and even if they can get through, a lack of nearby water points hampers their ability to fight the blaze. Tragically, people often die in the fires, and already impoverished families can lose everything. 

Once the flames were extinguished and the emergency services had left, officials started issuing emergency supplies, rebuilding material, and placed the affected people in temporary housing. People’s details were also captured on (paper) forms for follow up.

The long-term plan was to build permanent houses for the victims, by prioritising them on the government housing list. However, when the time came to make these allocations, serious problems arose. Many of the details captured were incorrect or incomplete, and some of the information was missing There was also duplicate capturing (some people came on multiple days to register) and forms that were either lost or had ink that was fading. Some of these problems were understandable as some people had lost their identifying documents, such as IDs and birth certificates, in the fire. 

Another problem was people, who were not victims of the fire, registering for houses in an attempt to skip the already long housing queue. The settlement was also home to a high population of foreigners, who neither had IDs nor were entitled to state housing.

The municipality did have some baseline information to go on as, several months before the fire, city officials had surveyed the area, capturing names and details of some of the residents. However, considering both the cost of building houses and sensitivities around the list, it was essential for the data to be as verifiable as possible. The municipality needed one central database where it could clearly identify who was eligible for new housing, who was still in temporary facilities, and where there was incomplete, fraudulent or corrupted data.

PwC solved this problem by designing a database that cross-referenced existing survey data with data from the Department of Home Affairs (to verify ID numbers and names). Since the system is built to recognise that people’s lives aren’t always straightforward, it had explicit categories for people without ID numbers (mostly foreigners) and people living in the same dwelling, whether as spouses, partners or family members.

With a checked, differentiated list of everyone who’d been affected by the blaze, city officials were able to make clear, explicable choices about how to reprioritise allocations. In an area where funding is always too low, and emotions are often too high, this was crucial.

Some points for the future

Every disaster is different, but the PwC team were able to summarise some key lessons from this project that all cities can apply:

1. Biometrics are an important tool that can alleviate many of the problems of identification. If teams assigned to capture people’s details have portable thumbprint scanners linked to the Department of Home Affairs databases, they can verify identities on the spot – and not have to worry about burned identity documents.
2. Having up-to-date information about people living in informal settlements is challenging, but essential. The municipality had made a good start on this, but the more data cities have about vulnerable residents the better they will be equipped to render assistance – both in normal times and in crises.
3. On-site electronic capture is king. Ink fades. Paper forms get mislaid. Numbers get transposed wrongly. If officials can use tablets for live capture, these problems can be picked up immediately.
4. Collaboration between the different tiers of government and agencies is crucial. If the home affairs department, social security agencies and municipalities could link their systems safely and seamlessly, crisis response could be fast and targeted. Where systems are fragmented, it is often people that fall through the gaps.