Red Cross Blogs

Becoming jobless

By Pete Garratt
November 11, 2009 at 10:04 am

Don’t get me wrong; in the current climate I’m pleased to have a job. The British Red Cross has been supporting a project to develop regional disaster response capacity in South Asia. In a sense this is working myself out of a job. Why should a disaster response require people from the so-called ‘developed’ countries to be deployed?

Well, experience has shown us that immediate rescue is carried out by local people and the reality then is that there are capable disaster management professionals from the country or region in question, particularly within the Red Cross. So we need to be doing more to facilitate the use of these skills within disaster response operations.
 
I’m recently returned from New Delhi, India where we were reviewing the progress being made in this. Great strides have been made to set up the necessary policies and systems to allow the Red Cross to deploy great people from the region quickly to their neighbouring countries to help provide a boost to the capacity of the local Red Cross. Right now two of the region’s disaster management staff have been utilised in this way in response to the typhoons that have buffeted the Philippines recently.

One of the most interesting aspects was the cooperation on this project between the disaster management teams in the Red Cross in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. What a good model for regional togetherness.

A current example of this form of regional response is in El Salvador, suffering the effects of flooding in the wake of Hurricane Ida, where Red Cross staff from neighbouring countries are on stand by and ready to assist in the disaster response operation.  Right now the Red Cross is assisting with search and rescue operations, providing first aid and conducting damage assessments. So far, they are utilising £100,000 to meet the relief needs of 1,500 families. Though the total scale of those affected is not comparable with the recent typhoons and earthquakes in Asia, it does ably demonstrate what the Red Cross is able to do all round the globe through our networks of volunteers and staff.

Image © Claudia Janke

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Tags: Asia Pacific, disaster response, earthquake, El Salvador, hurricanes, Indonesia, International, Movement, prepare for disasters, South Asia, typhoon

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 10:04 am and is filed under Emergencies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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