4 May 2006 - CRINMAIL 777
Special Edition on Disaster Risk Management
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- PLAN: Children and Disaster Risk Management [article]
- UNITED KINDGOM: Plan to Cut Impact of Natural Disasters Around the World [paper]
- JAMAICA: Guidelines for Child-Friendly Disaster Management and Response [guidelines]
- EDUCATION: ‘Disaster Proof’ Schools to Save Lives, Says UN [news]
- CUBA: Children and Young People’s Participation in Local Flood Risk Management [publication]
- UGANDA: Facilitating Community-Managed Disaster Risk Reduction [training]
- TEARFUND: Child Rights and Disaster Management [article]
- RESOURCES: Useful Papers and Websites
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Your submissions are welcome if you are working in the area of child rights. To contribute, email us at [email protected]. Adobe Acrobat is required for viewing some of the documents, and if required can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html If you do not receive this email in html format, you will not be able to see some hyperlinks in the text. At the end of each item we have therefore provided a full URL linking to a web page where further information is available.
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PLAN: Children and Disaster Risk Management [article]
"We were very depressed after the tsunami. We attended trauma counselling activities at tent schools and other recreational activities sponsored by international aid agencies. With the activities, we thought that we could continue on living. We helped our parents with the daily chores so that our parents did not get stressed too long." A child in Aceh, Indonesia.
Tens of thousands of children lost their lives in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004. Many more children would have survived if they had had more information and skills related to disaster reduction and response. Thousands of children died in the Kashmir earthquake and countless others have died or suffered terrible trauma in many other less high profile disasters.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) recognises that a child “is a subject of rights who is able to form and express opinions, to participate in decision-making processes and influence solutions, to intervene as a partner in the process of social change and in the building of democracy.” The case is now strongly made that initiatives that involve children benefit children and also benefit the family and wider community.
As the interpretation of the CRC develops, Plan is one of many child-rights-based organisations that have begun to highlight the need to extend this participatory principle to all aspects of disaster management. If we believe in the ability of those involved – be they adults or children – to articulate their needs, express their views, establish relationships with those who are there to assist them and take actions to improve their circumstances as essential to development, it must be even more critical in the humanitarian context. As children often constitute such a significant proportion of the affected population in disasters, ignoring their capacity means undermining the capacity of whole communities to cope with the situation.
Plan recognises that disaster management is a development issue. Fundamentally, development is about politics. That means encouraging all facets of society to work together to reduce the vulnerability of children and young people. Plan also recognises that disaster management is about children’s rights. As Amartya Sen’s work has confirmed, birth endows those rights, and living should entitle everyone to progressively realise those rights.
Plan’s recent experience in Asia has shown that children often form more than one third of the death toll in disasters. The lives of a similar percentage are severely disrupted through separation or loss of family members, through disruption to education and through the breakdown of communities. Elsewhere Plan has documented countless examples of how natural hazards have been exacerbated by poor governance, corruption and conflict. Almost everywhere, children’s specific needs are usually overlooked because they are ignored during planning processes. After Hurricane Mitch, it was consultation with children in El Salvador that highlighted the fact that emergency shelters did not allow for division of space between girls and boys and this created serious risks for girls. Plan’s experiences with community risk mapping and mitigation activities with youth disaster volunteer teams in the Philippines, Haiti and El Salvador have shown that children and young people’s capacity to participate in risk reduction is much greater than most realise, and can be invaluable in effective disaster preparedness and response.
There are big gaps in international policy, practice and knowledge about how best to articulate and recognise the roles, capacities and rights of children in disaster risk reduction (DRR). Plan is making a significant effort to fill these gaps. Plan is currently engaged on an extensive programme of action research, developing new approaches to child-centred risk reduction. Plan will be paying particular attention to the different impacts and roles of every segment of the young population; children are not all the same. Sensitivity to gender, age, ability and disability is essential. Through this work, Plan aims to reduce the impacts of ‘natural’ and ‘human-made’ disasters whilst reinforcing the rights of children.
For more information, contact:
Dr. Nick Hall
Disaster Risk Reduction Manager
Plan International UK
5-6 Underhill Street, London NW1 7HS, United Kingdom
Tel: +44(0)207 482 9774; Fax: +44(0)207 9778
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.plan-international.org
Recent Plan Publications
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UNITED KINDGOM: Plan to Cut Impact of Natural Disasters Around the World [paper]
Building earthquake-proof houses and investing in early warning systems are some of the simple ways to save lives and reduce the devastation caused by natural disasters outlined in a new policy published by the Department for International Development. The plan entitled Reducing the Risk of Disasters was launched recently by development minister, Gareth Thomas, at the offices of the international NGO Tearfund in London.
In his opening speech, Gareth Thomas said: “Disasters make it more difficult to make poverty history and it is always the poorest that suffer the most…Natural disasters will continue to increase in number and intensity because of climate change and there is nothing we can do to stop hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes from striking. But what we can do is help put simple measures in place such as better built houses, schools and hospitals alongside more hi-tech early warning systems to reduce the loss of life…The UK government will work with NGOs like Tearfund, the UN and national governments to help ensure countries are better prepared to reduce the vulnerability of people to natural hazards.”
DFID announced in 2005 that in future ten per cent of funds spent on disaster relief will be invested in ways to reduce the impact of disasters in the future where this can be done effectively. The new policy sets out ways to do this, including:
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a new training programme currently being designed for DFID staff to help them integrate disaster risk reduction into DFID’s work with NGOs and governments;
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a call for improvements in the international system such as the UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and stronger institutions within disaster-prone developing countries;
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working with other governments, World Bank and the UN to get disaster risk reduction measures included as a key issue in poverty reduction strategies; and
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measures to reduce the risk to the poor by supporting effective local action to predict or better deal with natural disasters.
Natural disasters wreak havoc, taking lives and devastating the economy and infrastructure of developing countries. The Asian tsunami claimed around 180,000 lives and the Pakistan earthquake a further 70,000 victims and both have had a long-term impact on the economic development of affected countries.
The aim of the new policy is to reduce the impact of disasters on the poor by reducing their vulnerability to those disasters. Following the Asian tsunami in December 2004 it is estimated that the number of people living below the poverty line in Banda Aceh, increased by up to 50 per cent. The economic losses from disasters in the 1990s totalled over $600 billion – greater than the economic losses of the four previous decades combined.
Action on disaster risk reduction, including a simple early warning system on the island of Simeulue near Indonesia, reforestation in Vietnam and earthquake-proof housing in Peru have already saved lives and proven to be cost-effective investments from which we can learn lessons on better coping with disasters.
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=8156&flag=report
For more information, contact:
Department for International Development (DFID)
1 Palace Street, London SW1E 5HE, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7023 0000; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7023 0019
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.dfid.gov.uk
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JAMAICA: Guidelines for Child-Friendly Disaster Management and Response [guidelines]
Jamaica’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM), as part of a cooperative initiative with UNICEF-Jamaica, has developed a set of guidelines to ensure that risk management, especially disaster response in Jamaica uses a child-rights approach. The Child Development Agency, the Planning Institute of Jamaica, the Salvation Army, 3D Projects and Children First were partners that participated in this initiative.
The booklet, Guidelines for Child-Friendly Disaster Management and Response, serves as an aide-memoire for planners and implementers in times of emergency. It uses a checklist format, making it easy for any practitioner in the field to refer quickly to the appropriate sector and guidelines for assistance. The general considerations for child-friendly disaster management and response include:
The importance of psychosocial support before, during and after emergencies is also highlighted. Relevant excerpts from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) include Articles 6, 9, 20, 22, 24, 28, 31, 34, 39. The Convention clearly states that children have the right to be the first to receive attention in any emergency situation. We must continue to advocate for provisions for children’s basic survival needs (food, water and shelter) as well as for their psycho-affective needs during times of emotional trauma, to provide love, recreation and play opportunities while recovery efforts are underway.
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infodetail.asp?id=8168
For more information, contact:
Monica Dias
Communication Officer
UNICEF Jamaica
60 Knutsford Boulevard, Pan-Caribbean Building, 8th Floor, Kingston 5, Jamaica
Tel: (+876) 926 7584 5; Fax: (+876) 929 8084
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.unicef.org/jamaica/index.html
More information on disaster risk reduction in the Caribbean
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EDUCATION: ‘Disaster Proof’ Schools to Save Lives, Says UN [news]
[29 March 2006, BONN] - The United Nations is launching a campaign to “disaster proof” schools to reduce the numbers of children crushed to death in earthquakes or washed away in floods. The campaign will be launched in Paris in June.
Some 18,000 children died in the Pakistan quake in October when their schools collapsed on top of them – roughly a quarter of the total death toll. Reinforcing the buildings would have cost as little as a dollar a child, one aid agency said last year.
The new campaign by the United Nations’ International Strategy for Disaster Reduction will also push governments to make lessons on natural hazards and how to reduce the risk of death and injury part of the school curriculum.
“The children are the … decision makers of the future. If you want to make a safer world I think you have to target children,” UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) spokeswoman Brigitte Leone said in a meeting at the Third International Early Warning Conference in Bonn. “We have two main objectives: to make schools safer and to get disaster reduction into the curriculum in primary and secondary schools.”
ISDR consultant and hazards expert Ben Wisner said there were an estimated 34 million children living in the 20 countries that registered the most deadly earthquakes during the 20th century.
Aid agency ActionAid is also launching a project to make schools safer and introduce disaster risk reduction into the curriculum. The programme will initially focus on Nepal, India, Malawi, Ghana, Kenya, Haiti and Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is often cited as an example of how inexpensive grass roots initiatives can save lives. Bangladesh’s disaster management minister, Chowdhury Kamal Ibne Yusuf, said all schools built since 2004 had been designed to double up as flood shelters. New schools are built from reinforced concrete and elevated from the ground. The country is also running a massive public awareness programme on risk reduction with a strong focus on reaching children through the classroom, he said.
The minister contrasted the cyclone that hit Bangladesh in 1991 with one that struck Los Angeles the following year. Some 138,000 people were killed in a single night in Bangladesh; just 18 died in Los Angeles. He said that without the resources of a developed country Bangladesh had to exploit low-tech solutions. “We now have around 3,000 cyclone shelters in coastal areas and off shore islands and around 30,000 trained volunteers,” he told AlertNet. The number of deaths in recent cyclones has fallen to 200 to 300, he said.
[Source: AlertNet]
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=7835&flag=news
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CUBA: Children and Young People’s Participation in Local Flood Risk Management [publication]
We Are Prepared Listening to the Waters reports on Save the Children UK’s work on disaster risk management with children and young people in Cuba. The resource, which is intended for children, teachers, authorities, local stakeholders and community members, includes information about the methodologies used and lessons learned to contribute to future initiatives.
Save the Children UK’s work on community risk management with children and young people in Cuba was developed in the mountainous Eastern provinces of Holguin and Guantanamo. Its main aim was to make youth participation an integral part of community risk management systems, focusing on mitigation and preparedness activities such as:
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planting riverbanks with bamboo to prevent erosion
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involving children in early warning systems
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‘risk mapping’ to improve school preparedness plans
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training young people as first aid brigades
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forming entertainment brigades specialising in artistic activities to help reduce the stress of evacuated populations after a hurricane
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launching a community focused educational campaign designed, implemented and evaluated by young people and aimed at changing community risk behaviour.
The programme, which received funding from the Disasters Preparedness Programme of the European Commission Humanitarian Office (DIPECHO), was divided into three separate projects which allowed institutions to learn from their experiences over a four year period and draw key lessons from each stage. The starting point was the training of school teachers and children on disaster-related issues. The stakeholders, including children, who undertook a participatory review, came to the conclusion that these activities were only working at a theoretical level and, for the next project, decided to involve children and young people in practical activities to prevent disasters caused by flooding and included peer education methodologies. In the third project a multi-risk approach was used to include other risk areas identified by the community in addition to flooding such as forest fires, earthquakes, flooding, landslides and hurricanes.
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infodetail.asp?id=8167
For a free copy of this publication, contact:
Tom Godfrey
International Operations – Latin American, Caribbean, Middle East and South East Europe
Save the Children UK
1 St. John’s Lane, London EC1M 4AR, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)207 012 6766
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.savethechildren.org.uk
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UGANDA: Facilitating Community-Managed Disaster Risk Reduction [training]
Date: October 23 – November 4, 2006
Location: Kampala, Uganda
After successfully conducting the Facilitating Community-Managed Disaster Risk Reduction Courses in Ecuador in October 2005 and in Kenya in March 2006, the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction is now bringing the course to Kampala, Uganda.
Today's world population is experiencing frequent natural disasters. Such conditions have resulted in widespread human, material and environmental losses. This situation highlights the need to recognise the link between disaster and development. Community Managed Disaster Risk Reduction (CMDRR) is one approach which bridges disaster and development. CMDRR refers to a process of disaster risk reduction in which communities are actively engaged in the identification, analysis, treatment, monitoring and evaluation of disaster risks in order to reduce people's vulnerability and enhance their capacities to overcome/reduce the impact of disasters on community life.
This two-week course is designed to increase the learners' ability to facilitate the Community Managed Disaster Risk Reduction process. At the end of this course, participants will be able to:
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Explain concepts of community managed risk reduction and facilitation;
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Demonstrate facilitation skills to conduct participatory assessments of vulnerabilities, capacities and needs based on the identified priority hazards pattern within the community;
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Examine the use of selected tools for CMDRR-centered participatory planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning;
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Consider approaches to sustainability of the CMDRR process;
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Prepare an action plan to initiate or promote CMDRR in his her own work settings.
Leaders, managers, trainers as well as development practitioners from government agencies, NGOs, donors and consultants will find this course valuable.
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=8157&flag=event
For more information or to receive a course application form for the course, contact:
Dr. Kennedy N. Igbokwe
Country Programme Coordinator
International Institute of Rural Reconstruction
Uganda Country Office, Plot 70. Bukolo Street, Kamwokya, Kampala, Uganda
Tel: (+256) 782692578
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.iirr.org
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TEARFUND: Child Rights and Disaster Management [article]
Recent disasters have again highlighted the greater vulnerability of children in relation to other sectors of the population. In the South Asia tsunami (December 2004), disproportionate numbers of children died, swept away by the force of the wave. The Kashmir earthquake (October 2005) killed a large number of children, as a result of the catastrophic collapse of school buildings.
Sadly, lack of information or wrong information have played a part in this mortality. Children died in the tsunami through ignorance of the warning signs. In some parts of Pakistan, teachers shepherded children inside school buildings when the tremors began, buildings which had little resistance to the ‘quake and soon collapsed, killing those inside.
Tearfund-supported disaster response projects seek to comply with the Red Cross Code of Conduct, in particular: “The prime motivation of our response to disaster is to alleviate human suffering amongst those least able to withstand the stress caused by the disaster” (from Principle 1); “Our provision of aid will reflect the degree of suffering it seeks to alleviate” (from Principle 2); and “We will strive to implement relief programmes which actively reduce the beneficiaries’ vulnerability to future disasters….” (from Principle 8).
Tearfund's work to reduce future vulnerability to disasters has included:
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Rebuilding schools in the aftermath of earthquakes and the tsunami to be more resistant than their predecessors to natural hazards in Indonesia;
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Delivering disaster preparedness messages to school children of all ages, and advocating for the incorporation of these into national curricula in Pakistan and North East India;
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Developing child-focused health education (CFHE) for displaced children to reduce incidence of disease, in Balochistan, Darfur and Pakistan; and
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Running therapeutic and supplementary feeding programmes for under-fives in Southern Sudan, where mothers have been taught improved nutrition practices to reduce vulnerability to drought.
For more information, contact
Keith Ewing
Head of Media and PR
Tearfund
100 Church Road, Teddington, TW11 8QE
Tel: + 44 208 943 7779
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.tearfund.org
Recent Tearfund publications
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RESOURCES: Useful Papers and Websites
Oxfam: Dealing with Disasters – Online Resource
US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for Children Website
DFID: Frequently Asked Questions on Disaster Risk Reduction
UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction
Provention Consortium: Community Risk Assessment Toolkit
AlertNet: New Website
Read CRIN’s special editions of CRINMAIL on the tsunamis in South Asia:
CRINMAIL 742
CRINMAIL 641
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