Inzending 2011 - Risk awareness in Disaster Risk Reduction

Cordaid supports a programme for Community-Managed Disaster Risk Reduction. This is a community driven approach to assist the community to develop an analysis of the hazards that they face and to develop an action plan for the reduction of risks.

The Cordaid strategy in this CMDRR programme is investing in capacities of local partner organisations to reduce the risk in case of a disaster, by implementing local structures, such as village committees, improve disaster knowledge and hazard awareness, implement risk reduction measures and early warning systems.

The programme has been very effective in increasing the resilience of communities. However, some of the DRR interventions were conducted with little or no attention to hazard analysis. For instance, irrigation pumps in Ethiopia were not well secured against flooding, or community centre roofs in Bangladesh, that were not secured against cyclones.

The lesson is that disaster risk reduction is still not completely internalized by the partners. For the majority of partners DRR is just a single project, or an approach to community mobilization, rather than a risk-aware approach. Partners should subject their projects to a hazard analysis, and include hazard analysis in their project proposals. Apart from that, Cordaid should include hazard risks as a standard part of its funding decisions, so that risk-aware approaches are mainstreamed