Post-conflict or post-disaster reconstruction is often declared complete once roads reopen and buildings are rebuilt, yet daily life may remain fragile. This article proposes a practical KPI (key performance indicator) framework to “make recovery visible” for citizens and decision makers. Building on internationally recognized monitoring approaches—such as the Sendai Framework indicator logic for losses and critical infrastructure, PDNA methods for cross-sector needs assessment, FEMA’s National Disaster Recovery Framework emphasis on outcome tracking, and OECD work on resilience indicators—we translate recovery into a small, comprehensible dashboard.
We outline five design principles: outcome focus (live/work/learn/receive care), comparability (baseline–current–target), disaggregation (place and vulnerability groups), actionability (clear links to budgets and operational levers), and transparency (public definitions, data sources, and revision logs). A step-by-step workflow is provided: define “recovery,” select domains, build one-page KPI sheets using an input–output–outcome chain, set targets and thresholds, and determine update cycles (weekly for transport, monthly for jobs, quarterly for population). We present an illustrative KPI set across population and housing, livelihoods and employment, education, health and welfare, mobility and logistics, commerce and services, lifeline infrastructure, and social trust. We also recommend participatory indicators—return-intention surveys, service satisfaction, and isolation-risk proxies—so “hard” infrastructure progress is balanced with “soft” community signals. Finally, we propose “future city” KPIs that capture build-back-better capacity—redundancy of lifelines, early-warning reach, decarbonization alignment, and automated data updates—so recovery measurement simultaneously strengthens resilience to the next shock. A concise dashboard can function as a shared language, enabling accountable prioritization, faster course correction, and sustained public trust over time.
