Focussing on urgent post-crisis assistance, this guidance note provides practical advice to United NationsDevelopment Programme (UNDP) Country Offices (COs) on how to plan, design and implement a post-crisis emergency
employment and enterprise recovery project that supports governments and communities following a significant national catastrophe.

When governments and communities are assisted by well-designed and timely interventions they are more able to ‘build back better.’ The UNDP post-crisis approach aims to build capacities within national and local institutions and
facilitate partnerships between government, civil society, the private sector and local communities. This enables local social, economic, institutional and physical assets to be strengthened and made more disaster-resilient in the future.

To help countries and communities meet these challenges, the UNDP Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery (BCPR) has developed a range of guidance notes to help UNDP COs develop and implement recovery activities rapidly in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. Each guidance note focuses on a UNDP ‘signature product’, or niche area of programming, in which UNDP has the mandate, comparative advantage, competencies and skills in place to be able to rapidly design and implement a project of assistance to support crisis affected governments and communities. The guidance notes in the ‘signature product’ series are principally intended as an internal resource that will strengthen and accelerate UNDP’s programmatic response in crisis and post-crisis settings. They are chiefly intended to inform ‘post-disaster’ planning and implementation. However, a number of the case studies that fed into their formulation derived their experience from post-conflict settings. Therefore, they may also be adapted for use in post-conflict settings or within country environments situated at the post-conflict/post disaster nexus.

This guidance note forms one of six practically oriented documents. Others in the series include ‘Community Infrastructure Rehabilitation’, ‘Debris Management’, ‘Restoration of Local Governance Functions’, ‘National Recovery
Planning and Coordination’ and ‘Aid Management’. These notes can be used as tools to guide the development of individual projects targeted towards specific needs, and/or provide a basis for the design of a more integrated and
comprehensive programme of early recovery measures.