A.D.R.A. and USAID address disaster and aftermath training

02 September 2016, 12:00AM

Workshops have been conducted in four selected villages (Satufia and Vailoa in Savaii; Matafa’a and Faleaseela in Upolu) as part of the Community Disaster and Climate Risk Management (CDCRM) programme.

This is one of two components of the community disaster management and livelihood development project in Samoa implemented by the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) Samoa and funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) under its Pacific American Climate Fund (PACAM) programme.

The CDCRM has four phases to be implemented to complete the programme. 

Phase one is conducting household surveys which was completed in February 2016.

The report was approved by PACAM in April 2016 and also submitted to the National Disaster 

The remaining three phases are: 

The CDCRM toolkit delivery, 

The training of village response teams and 

Testing the response plans through the simulation exercises.

Project Background

Samoa is at risk from a wide range of natural disasters such as earthquakes, tropical cyclones, tsunamis and flooding. The 2009 tsunami underlines the vulnerability of many communities with extensive damages and loss of life. Despite this high level risk, the capabilities of organizations involved in preparedness are limited. In particular, there is little focus on community based preparedness and risk reduction, and approaches across agencies are often inconsistent.

Since the 2009 tsunami, the Samoa NDMO has become increasingly aware of these limitations at community level particularly in relations to disaster preparedness. As a consequence, NDMO commissioned an external consultant with extensive disaster management experience, to develop a training tool that could be rolled out across all communities. 

This would encourage a consistent approach to community based disaster management (in particular to preparedness) across all agencies involved in the sector thus the introduction of the community disaster and climate risk management (CDCRM) programme.

Community Disaster and Climate Risk Management

The CDCRM component is a national program that was developed under contract with the NDMO of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MNRE). 

The purpose of this component is to support the NDMO’s mandate under the National Action Plan 2011 – 2016 (NAP) to address capacity gaps under Theme 3: Community Risk Management. The target groups of the entire CDCRM program are the 361 villages in Samoa. Hence, this component of the PACAM project focused on 4 selected villages whilst NDMO focus on the remaining villages of Samoa. 

This project links to the CDCRM national program by allowing ADRA Samoa to become an implementing partner agency (IPA) to assist in the delivering the CDCRM component of this project to the selected villages through the financial assistance from USAID through PACAM.

Toolkit Delivery

The toolkit is a resource designed to support a standardized approach to building disaster risk management (DRM) capacity of communities. It is divided into 5 modules.

Module A and B focuses primarily on identifying disaster and climate risks in the community and developing a Community Action Plan to assist the community to reduce these risks. Module C, D and E are centered on preparing communities to respond to a range of hazards.

02 September 2016, 12:00AM
Samoa Observer

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