Seen and unseen vulnerabilities: Evaluating recovery from the 2015 Nepal earthquake to inform more equitable post-disaster needs assessments

As disasters disproportionately impact socially vulnerable groups, it is critical to ensure that sufficient, timely, and appropriate disaster recovery aid and efforts are channeled towards such groups. Ensuring that disaster impact assessments accurately account for how different communities are affected by the studied events is thus essential, as these assessments often inform and shape subsequent disaster recovery programs. However, it is not clear whether disaster impact assessments have managed to accurately estimate and account for the post-disaster needs of socially vulnerable groups, as there have been few studies that empirically examine their performance in this area. To address this gap, this paper examines the degree to which a Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) carried out after a devastating earthquake in Nepal in 2015 accurately identified socially vulnerable groups as seen in recovery outcomes four years later. Recovery outcomes were assessed using a household survey of over 800 households living in seven districts most affected by the earthquake. We find that while the PDNA did accurately identify some of the groups that were vulnerable to poorer post-disaster outcomes, such as women and poor households, it missed other groups who had worse recovery outcomes, such as households with debt. Our analyses also suggest that Nepal's PDNA efforts to encourage equitable recovery, which was focused on income resumption and housing rebuilding only, overlooked other important recovery outcomes such as health. Future disaster impact assessments should thus pay greater attention to ensuring equitable recovery in the health domains.