Building Disaster Resilience in Pakistan (BDRP) is a £30 million programme for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) that aims to increase Pakistan’s capability to reduce disaster risk through better planning, preparedness and response at government and community levels. The programme has two core components: Community-based Disaster Risk Management, implemented by a consortium led by Concern Worldwide; and Institutional Strengthening, implemented by a United Nations consortium led by the Food and Agriculture Organization. The pilot phase of the project was implemented from September 2016 to September 2018 in four flood-prone districts. Based on learning from the pilot phase, the implementation of Scale up Phase started from October 2018 in nine disaster prone areas of Pakistan and will continue until September 2020.

Integrity provides third-party monitoring services to FCDO for BDRP. We complement internal consortium monitoring to increase accountability, oversight, and evidence-based learning on the programme. We also provide learning opportunities to inform the design of the next phase of FCDO resilience programming in Pakistan. We provide assurance to FCDO Pakistan that the activities of BDRP under Phase II are being delivered to time and quality; an assessment that implementing partners are on track and programme results are being achieved; and commentary and evidence where activities have worked well and where activities can be improved. Integrity carries out its third-party monitoring activities of the BDRP programme in all nine implementation districts across Punjab, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. We engage with the implementing consortium, provincial government officials, and the communities in these districts to carry out the work.

After the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 in Pakistan, Integrity has broadened the scope of monitoring to include the spread and impact of the virus on BDRP’s target communities. Starting March 2020, Integrity has undertaken a new set of activities to provide evidence–based learning to provide information that can help bring necessary changes to FCDO’s current resilience programming in Pakistan, and to further inform the design of the next phase of FCDO resilience programming in the country.