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Disaster Response and Recovery (DRR) Training Course |
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Thursday, 28 May 2009 |
“We must involve communities in disaster management as our focus is to rebuild communities after a disaster and educate them on how to prevent the next one,” said Mohd Radzi Jamaludin, MERCY Malaysia Head of Human Resources and Volunteer Management and the training course coordinator, said.
Mohd Radzi was met after the Disaster Response and Recovery (DRR) training course organised by MERCY Malaysia and funded by the Economic Planning Unit.
KUALA LUMPUR, 28 May 2009 - Local communities must be included in disaster management or efforts to educate them on escaping the effects of the next disaster will come to naught.
Participants at a training course on disaster management learned that without community engagement, disaster management programmes will fail.
“We must involve communities in disaster management as our focus is to rebuild communities after a disaster and educate them on how to prevent the next one,” said Mohd Radzi Jamaludin, MERCY Malaysia Head of Human Resources and Volunteer Management and the training course coordinator, said.
Mohd Radzi was met after the Disaster Response and Recovery training course organised by MERCY Malaysia and funded by the Economic Planning Unit.
“The strength of the course is not just on learning, but on sharing experiences as well, especially on the roles of government and NGOs on disaster response and recovery,” he added.
The course saw representatives from over 12 countries including those from nations recently hit by the hardest of conflicts and natural disasters.
Held from 19 to 27 March, among its objectives was to enhance the participants’ ability to respond to disaster effectively and appropriately while introducing standards that would serve as the guiding principles for humanitarian workers on the field.
“We will try our best to adopt the new crisis assistance standards in our country and I will work on implementing it into our Government policy,” participant Suman Ghimire, of Nepal’s Ministry of Home Affairs’ Disaster Management Section said.
He said that the standards, widely known in the humanitarian sector as the SPHERE Standards, were comprehensive and stressed on quality as well as quantity in order to achieve the best practice in providing aid.
The standards defined, among others, the minimum amount of water to provide a beneficiary per day - which is 7.5 liters. Participants were also informed of the minimum sizes for shelters as well as distances to water distribution points and toilets to the affected communities in the aftermath of a disaster.
The SPHERE Standards, which has been widely adopted by the humanitarian sector, ensures that humanitarian organisations adhere to quality and accountability practices when on the field.
In Kuala Lumpur, government and non-state officials from countries ranging from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Sudan and Chile have agreed to adopt the new standard sets, further marking the commitment of countries to maintain accountability to beneficiaries.
“The training is invaluable because of the networking aspect whereby I got to learn on how my counterparts in the other countries work in disaster management. I am looking forward to maximising the utilisation of the training to create safer communities in my country,” Muhammad Bilal, Director of the National Disaster Management Authority from Pakistan, said.
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