The best way to asses vulnerability is to conduct qualitative study with a strong observational component. The life style of the people in the slums can tell the causes and effects of vulnerability. Focused group discussion and in-depth interviews helps.

What' your purpose?

I am working in Health for Urban Poor Programme in India. My organization is providing technical support to Government of India for rolling out urban health programme. Since last four years we have collected large information's through research (implementation and operation) about need of urban health programme. We have already done situation analysis type of studies. What more we can do in this issue for larger dissemination, while GoI has launched urban health programme in second quarter of this year.

Sumoni, There are numerous approaches you can use to assess vulnerability. First, you will need to determine what you want to define as making the community a vulnerable one. This could be looked at in terms of (1) presence of disease; (2) level of crime; (3) risk or level of poverty; (4) access to healthcare; (5) access to education, etc. If you have access to government data on any of these, you could study them individually or you could use all the variables that you feel make a community most vulnerable and develop a "composite score" that could reflect the overall level of vulnerability. You could obtain your data from public sources, and/or you could conduct interviews and surveys among the people in the community to assess each variable. It depends on how you want to approach it and if you want hard facts or the community's perspective or even both. It sounds extremely interesting AND important! Good for you for investing in such a project!

Thank you Jeanie, I was also thinking in a same way but I was not really confidant enough. Your suggestion will really help me. I am conceptualizing on the social-ecology model, where outcome will be health status, household environment and WASH behaviour will be intermediate and proximate will be location of the slums. Do you feel this will be good enough to see venerability.

In agreement with Jeanie. What you have is a pre-existing data, which seems to be needs assessment. But vulnerabilty and damage resistance has its own metrics. I suggest, have a look at http://www.oecd.org/site/progresskorea/44121291.pdf

It is a good beginning point.

Dr. S. M. Sapatnekar

Also,

http://www.iariw.org/papers/2011/MorronePaper.pdf

Probably there are many other factors that can be used to measure vulnerability, as, for instance, access to food and/or access to safe food. According to catering, i think it is fundamental to define the framework of your research, since there is not a dimension of vulnerability alone

Hi Sumoni, I found a document (not so recent) that can be interesting for you. The author is an economist who appears to be highly skilled in this issue. Maybe you could try to contact him

Caterina Mammina........Just gone through. This is really good one. Thank you very much.

Shreekant Sapatnekar......looking into the documents.........really the suggestions helping me lot.

Thank you Michele West-Lax. There are some problem, the file is not opening. Do I need to log in and then down the file?

There is a research program based at University of Lausanne, with University of Geneva, called the LIVES project, which focuses its efforts on vulnerability. Google LIVES Lauzanne to find it. You will find some working papers in its series that address vulnerability

Check out the LIVES research program at University of Lausanne, Switzerland. It s a large program based at that university in collaboration with University of Geneva, and its research theme is vulnerability over the life course. Its website provides numerous working papers dealing with vulnerability. I attach just one of them.

@ Michele West-Lax , received the document.....Thank you very much

@ Victor Marshall , Just reading the document. Thank you.....

The best way to asses vulnerability is to conduct qualitative study with a strong observational component. The life style of the people in the slums can tell the causes and effects of vulnerability. Focused group discussion and in-depth interviews helps.

I think the measurement of vulnerability using indices and indicators is not incompatible with qualitative studies. Both are very useful and can be used in concert to establish mitigation of this vulnerability. For example, qualitative analysis is essential to demonstrate the evolution of this vulnerability, however the index allows us to immediately diagnose those places that, according to these evolutions metioned before, show a higher vulnerability and deserve urgently being taken care of with respect to others. The measures carried out must, of course ,consider the involvement of actors and activities that have given this scenario over time.

You need the qualitative part in order to identify the factors that increase or moderate vulnerability. In order to compare places and also to be able to communicate about the differences you see, you may want to use variables that indicate at these factors. Such indicators may be aggregated into an index and/or presented in maps.

Of course vulnerability doesn't exist in a vacuum; it intersects with the presence , probability and magnitude of threats. This interplay needs to be measured to understand the protection issues in any setting. A very useful tool for humanitarian settings, which may be applicable in some development settings (including slums) is the Minimum Standards for Protection Mainstreaming. See: http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Full_Report_3752.pdf

Dear Sumoni

We have published some papers on vulnerability and adaptation assessment. i am enclosing a few, which are at small spatial scale but contains indicators and methods. The paper on slum vulnerability is under publication.

Article Assessing climate change vulnerability of water at household level

Article Socio-ecological Vulnerability of Smallholders due to Climat...

Article Agroecology as a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy for Smal...

Article The Multidimensional Livelihood Vulnerability Index – an ins...

Article Empirical assessment of adaptation to climate change impact ...

Dear Dr Rajiv,

Thank you very much. These will definitely increase my knowledge. I will go through all these and will definitely disturb you if I have any questions.

With Regards

Sumoni 

Vulnerability is a rather complex matter, especially in urban slums as they are far more complex compared to rural settings. I suggest starting with an analysis of the assts people have, which help them to earn a livelihood (livelihood capitals). This can be done quantitatively, but deeper insights you get, when you add qualitative methods. Earlier focus group discussions have been mentioned. I have very positive experience with such methods, especially as they help to get better insights from people's perspectives as they often differ a lot what the researcher things are important issues.

However I would not do too much in the sense to find too many things at one time. A focus group discussion should provide insight into one important aspect of vulnerability. Maybe have a few groups (e.g. young women, elderly women, young men, elderly men) to get a feeling also about gender and age difference regarding a particular issue.

What is more difficult is to analyse how the lives of people are influenced by changing political, economic and other environments that often operate at higher levels, outside the people's scope of influence, but bringing change, making decisions that can have big impacts on people's lives.

Such multi-level analysis asks the question of how people's lives (and their vulnerabilities) are influenced by structures and processes that happen outside and to where they have little or no influence .......

As you want to compare the situation in more than one city I would recommend to start with a single slum in a single city and once the methods are practised and have provided good insights, then you can standardize the methods so that you can apply it to slums in other cities.

Finally, I htink that it is important to see people as actors and analysing their agency would be looking at opportunities and constraints and how people deal with both. I am certain that such perspective will provide very meaningfull insights

The assessment of livelihoods vulnerability can be done quantitatively by using the sustainable livelihood index