Disasters kill more than 80,000 people each year on average and annually affect the lives of over 200 million – predominantly poor – people. Is this level of vulnerability inevitable? Could NGOs be doing more to help communities develop disaster mitigation and preparedness (DMP) measures? What low-cost, reproducible DMP practices could be mainstreamed into the work of development agencies?

A British Red Cross study uses evidence from interviews with British NGOs and from national case studies exploring the DMP activities of local and international NGOs to highlight the need for change. International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and donors are urged to overcome the constraints that currently prevent DMP from being mainstreamed into development and relief programmes.

Increasingly, it is recognised that governments cannot achieve significant, sustainable hazard risk reduction on their own and that greater emphasis must be placed on local-level and community-based approaches using indigenous knowledge. The researchers found that although INGOs do undertake a range of DMP activities with their local partners, these are poorly documented and rarely evaluated. Tensions between emergency and development staff mean that DMP often gets lost in the middle. Institutional memory about DMP is poor due to high staff turnover.

There is little dedicated DMP funding. Donors impose constraints on the use of emergency funding for longer-term risk reduction initiatives. The transfer of most DMP funding responsibilities within the European Commission and DFID to geographical desks increases the likelihood of further marginalisation of risk reduction.

Other key points in the project’s research papers are that:

• NGO planners and desk officers are too busy with their everyday concerns to reflect about or absorb new ideas.
• Government disaster management plans rarely go beyond issues of disaster preparedness – if governments engaged more seriously with longer-term mitigation, this could encourage NGOs.
• There is a common misconception that doing development work somehow amounts to ‘doing DMP’: in fact, development initiatives do not necessarily eliminate risk.
• While each large individual disaster catches the headlines and creates a momentum for change, this is often short-lived and goes into decline once relief and rehabilitation operations are completed.

DMP is moving up the policy agenda of many NGOs. More agencies are now appointing DMP specialists. Increased involvement of local and international NGOs with governments is providing space for influencing policy. The Red Cross studies urge the need to add impetus by:

• getting away from the divisive categorisation of work as either ‘emergency’ or ‘development’
• advocating the benefits of DMP more vigorously
• developing practical guidelines for project planning and preparation, complemented by project case study materials
• exploring mechanisms for the transfer of information across programmes and down successive generations of staff
• developing reliable indicators for assessing, measuring and evaluating preparedness and mitigation actions
• replacing the standard, and often off-putting, disaster terminology of mitigation and preparedness with the language of ‘hazard risk reduction’.

Source(s):
‘NGO initiatives in risk reduction: a summary of the research studies’, British Red Cross, by John Twigg, Charlotte Benson and Mary Myers, November 2000 Full document.
Country case studies from Bangladesh, India, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Zimbabwe Full document.
'Disasters: The Journal of Disaster Studies', Volume 25: Issue 3, September 2001

Funded by: DFID (SSRU R7321)

id21 Research Highlight: 24 January 2003

Further Information:
Richard Blewitt
NGO Disaster Mitigation and Preparedness Project
British Red Cross Society
9 Grosvenor Crescent
London SWIX 7EJ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)207 235 5454
Contact the contributor: rblewitt@redcross.org.uk

British Red Cross NGO Natural Disaster Mitigation and Preparedness Project

John Twigg
Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
UK

Tel: +44 (0)207 679 2436
Contact the contributor: j.twigg@ucl.ac.uk

Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre, UCL, UK

Disaster and Risk Reduction Group
(part of British Overseas NGOs for Development – BOND – network)
Nadia Saim
Emergencies Officer
HelpAge International
PO Box 32832
London N1 9ZN
United Kingdom

Tel: + 44 (0)20 7278 7778
Fax: + 44 (0)20 7713 7993
Contact the contributor: nsaim@helpage.org

Disaster & Risk Reduction Group

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