Wednesday, 08 July 2009 - The Disaster Risk Reduction Department conducted a 4-day Community-Based Disaster Risk Management (CBDRM) workshop in Yogyakarta. MERCY Malaysia and the Society for Health, Education, Environment and Peace (SHEEP) agreed to implement a project this year titled "Capacity Development of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and CBDRM in Indonesia". This workshop is one of the activities of this project.

The workshop was held from May 12 – 15 and saw about 20 CSOs from Sumatera, Java, Bali, Nusa Tenggara Island, and Borneo, which have committed to initiate DRR efforts, selected by SHEEP to participate in the workshop. The objective of this workshop was to train and increase the capacity of these organisations in conducting DRR projects with their own communities.

Activities conducted at this workshop include training on DRR concepts, CBDRM approaches, as well as DRR tools such as Town Watching. At the end of the workshop, each CSO was required to come up with an action plan of the CBDRM project that they aim to initiate with their communities, which must be completed within the next 6 months.

A follow-up workshop is planned to be held in November 2009 - six months after the first workshop - where all participating CSOs will share their experiences in implementing the CBDRM projects.