Initial damage assessment is the first step in the recovery process to have a clear picture of the magnitude of damage to life, property, crops, livelihoods and infrastructure resulting from a war or a disaster. Disaster comes as a complete surprise to the people and Governments in the absence of preparedness; dumps everything into a state of confusion. In this confused state, different organizations including humanitarian organization, try to take the lead in carrying out the initial assessments to retrieve information for immediate planning and relief distribution. Most of the initial assessments are done by various agencies, is uncoordinated and leads to piece meal information gathering resulting in generating inaccurate information. Due to uncoordinated effort on initial assessment, it is often witnessed that people who have been devastated by a disaster are being grilled by the interviewers filling up questionnaires. These unfortunate victims are sometimes not aware of the purpose of these surveys and questions arise in their mind are: Why? What? How many? When?, etc. It was reported in Sri Lanka, after the tsunami, a surviving woman was interviewed by twelve different interviewers during the first week of the disaster. In some cases these uncoordinated information collection methodology went at such extreme stage that communities were chasing away any official who came with forms or questionnaires. These situations highlight the need for disaster preparedness and planning for management of a disaster. Who will do what, when a disaster hits? On the flip side of the coin, it has also been witnessed that organized communities had gathered all the information accurately immediately after the disaster and they 3 What Remains in Kabul Afghanistan ©Rasna Warah People’s Process in Post-disaster and Post-conflict Recovery and Reconstruction 10 were in a position to present the information to outsiders who visited them. Through this process the community take responsibility and helps in providing immediate support to the ones who need most. One important principle to be followed in damage assessments is the decentralization of information gathering to lowest official entity. This means that the geographical cell of information gathering has to be the smallest area covered by a Government administrative unit. Gathering information based on the existing administrative divisions, greatly helps in post disaster recovery and coordination with the local government