After Action Review Workshop – Puttalam

An After-Action Review (AAR) is a qualitative review of actions taken to respond to an emergency event or following a project or an intervention as a means of identifying and documenting best practices demonstrated and challenges encountered during the response to the event or the implementation of the project. Each disaster event provides opportunities to learn and unlearn our actions. After-Action Reviews enable assessment of the level of engagement and leadership by the local actors in emergency response actions. Due to the high-risk and vulnerability profiles of the APP countries, they are constantly exposed to a multitude of disaster events. It is therefore critical to understand, review and learn from such events to ensure that the response activities are aligned with the needs of communities and prepare them for future events.

The AAR process generally involves a structured facilitated discussion or experience sharing among responders to critically and systematically review what was in place before the response and could have been used, what actually happened during the response, what went well, what needs to be improved, why events occurred as they did and how to improve.

The main objectives of AAR include:

• Undertaking a review of preparedness and response actions to a particular disaster event
  testing the effectiveness of disaster response and engagement of local actors in preparing for and responding to the disaster events
• Documenting findings and lessons learned
• Identifying the corrective actions or improvements needed to institutionalize any lessons emerging from the management of such disaster events

Cover photo by Freepik