Socio-economic rehabilitation: Many people and communities could not recover
from the impacts of the earthquake. The only way to revive the community was
to achieve socio-economic rehabilitation at an individual level.
• Community rebuilding: It was necessary to rebuild broken communities. It was
essential for people to take action by themselves. To rebuild, much work and
support was necessary. This should be achieved through the cooperation of
people, administration and NGOs/ NPOs.
To address the main concerns described above, the People’s Rehabilitation
Plan (PRP, 1998) was proposed three years after the earthquake. The plan was
formulated to achieve the remaining ’20 per cent rehabilitation’, that the administration
had thus far been unable to achieve. The plan was based on three key concepts:
‘environment’; ‘living together’; and ‘civil society’ and was implemented according to
three themes: ‘community building and planning’; ‘alternative livelihoods’; and ‘living
safely in the community’. There were several main problems: problems of housing;
discrimination between supported and unsupported areas; appropriate consideration of
civic bonds and existing social capital; damage to the small-scale industries and
resulting unemployment; loss of workplaces in the community; concentration of
damages on the socially weaker parts; and changes in the roles of volunteers in the new
society. Specific measures were suggested to incorporate these problems in the
rehabilitation plan to treat these issues with more sensitivity. Thus, the People’s
Rehabilitation Plan focused on community activity for livelihood recovery and creating
a safer and more sustainable environment.