The Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment (VCA) is a participatory investigative process developed by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) to enable communities to become more resilient to natural hazards by assessing and analyzing the risks faced and allowing them to identify actions. VCA allows Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) National Societies to explore the source of risks, identify the most affected communities and strengthen capacities. RCRC National Societies upload and access reports via the EVCA repository, providing vulnerability and capacity assessments at community levels across countries. Because the VCA tool benefits from near-constant development to manage its growing number of reports, IFRC sought a more-automated process to quickly scan VCA/EVCA reports to extract and visualize the required data to identify trends and gaps.
DFS provided support to IFRC to manually curate and structure existing RCRC reports into an analytical framework in DEEP allowing IFRC to further develop their assessment tools. Today, DFS supports IFRC to develop a system of extracting and visualizing the necessary information in VCA/EVCA reports in the EVCA repository to get snapshots of key data regarding main hazards, exposures, vulnerability, capacity and risks for communities concerned. After piloting the project in the Philippines, DFS partnered with IFRC on a global roll out by finalizing the list of relevant criteria, generating a representative sample of documents to tag, and coordinating the tagging of the reports leading to more effective disaster risk management.
