Community based disaster preparedness is based on the premise that the communities living in disaster-prone areas, need to strengthen people’s capacity and organize them to deal with disasters.
Preparedness at the community level helps reduce the tendency of communities to rely on external aid when disaster strikes.
It also reduces overall vulnerability against natural disasters, helps people to deal with disasters, and ensures a timely and accurate response.
While preparedness is vital in reducing the loss of lives, more important is changing the context of communities that make them vulnerable. The context in this case is their risky habitations, poor housing and sanitation conditions. They are in this context due to abject poverty, lack of health awareness and education. Sustainability of disaster preparedness lies in addressing these vulnerability conditions and changing their context, while organizing them to deal with disasters.
The Process: The process involves people of a particular region in developing disaster management plans and implementing them.
Typical community based disaster preparedness (CBDP) programs initiated by various agencies in India, undertake a needs survey of the villages as the initial step. The needs survey is based on the past experiences of the village when it faced a cyclone or when it had floods.
This is ascertained with village meetings and discussion with different sections of the community including women. It is followed by community coming together to articulate its own strengths and weaknesses with respect to a disaster situation. Within this process, the community identifies threats and needs during a cyclone or flood, and plans a disaster management plan, which includes:
- Developing an area map,
- Identifying vulnerable areas and families,
- Discussing the past history of disasters,
- Developing contingency actions, and
- Forming key action groups.
Village contingency plan or social mapping: A key component of the community-level disaster management plan is the formation of the village contingency plan and village task force groups. The contingency plan takes shape when the community assesses the village situation and develops a list of activities that they agree to follow to minimize communal and individual damage in the event of a disaster. The contingency plan maps out all households in a village or habitation that the NGO has chosen to intervene. While preparing contingency plans, the household are digitized and tracked based on a household number. The plan also specifies actions to be taken by individuals in the community so that each one knows what to do when a cyclone or flood warning is received.
Key Message: In any disaster what matters most is the time gap between the disaster event and the response that follows. Most of the damage to lives and properties occur during the period of this gap. Therefore, it is not a right idea to leave the responsibility of saving lives to the government agencies alone. The response to a disaster should start where the disaster strikes. The loss of lives and assets can be minimized, only if that response comes from an organized local group at the community level.
Related Publication:
http://www.unicef.org/india/ConferenceCommunitybasedDisasterRiskReductionreport.pdf
