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The Disaster Management & Information Programme, which was established in 2003, is a joint collaboration of the Green Movement of Sri Lanka and the Disaster & Development Centre in United Kingdom. The activities conducted under this programme took on a great significance during the post-tsunami reconstruction and rehabilitation effort - especially in the emergency response phase of the activities. The GMSL was one of the very few Sri Lankan organizations that had a disaster management program prior to the tsunamis and this stood us in good stead in the two years following the tragedy. While much material assistance to victims of disaster has been channeled through this program, the focus of the DMIP has shifted towards policy mapping, lobbying for community participation, aid effectiveness in disaster situations and community based disaster risk reduction efforts. |
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The DMIP is not another project to attract funding or support. It aims at establishing a creative space for communities primarily and government agencies, civil society groups, private sector organizations, academic institutions and international agencies secondarily to strengthen the coordination of humanitarian emergency mitigation, planning, assistance, management and interventions in Sri Lanka and ensure better preparation. It also intends to facilitate rapid, well-coordinated response to complex humanitarian emergencies as well as sudden and natural disasters. |
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The Objectives of the DMIP |
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- Ensure community resilience and true participation in disaster preparedness, mitigation and recovery.
- Work with the government to formulate and implement sound policy and strong legislature that is set up within a community friendly assistance architecture
- Work to strengthen the national disaster management program by supportive efforts in the areas of experience sharing, information gathering, risk reduction and recovery
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The framework of operation of the DMIP |
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The GMSL strategy is to work towards a strong and well thought out national disaster management paradigm that factors in the primary claimholder (the citizens of Sri Lanka) at a very significant level while assisting national effort through community friendly activities that support this paradigm.
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The GMSL takes the view that the communities themselves have a very clear idea about how to prepare for and recover from disaster situations and will assist intensely area specific action on the part of the communities to formulate (formalize) such action that can be factored into the national disaster management program. The rationale here is that past community cohesiveness (which is the reason for a community to exist in the first place) could never have been engineered unless they had methods of addressing crisis conditions and recovering from them. In past disaster situations, the GMSL observed that community ideas were completely ignored, external agents decided on what should be done in all aspects of disaster management and in the process of attempting to implement such ideas, ensured that the victims were even more traumatized, marginalized and ignored. Thus, it is obvious that in order to create a win-situation for the primary claimholders (the citizens of Sri Lanka) it is crucial to factor in their own methods for managing disaster. This has the two fold effect of assuring true ownership of disaster management to the communities and prevents exploitation of disaster situations by external agents.
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The DMIP is working extensively to formulate a sound policy with government agencies in order to make sure that the national disaster management process is able to prepare for and respond to disaster with high impact interventions. For this, the DMIP has been assisting the government to formulate such policy with the help of many key players from the government, private and civil sectors. This assistance is based on comprehensive research done on the proven effectiveness of community owned, community based, community driven, area specific disaster management activities.
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The key players understand clearly that disaster situations can make for both blue-collar and white-collar exploitation. While basic corruption, favoritism and graft can be addressed by guidelines and legislature that control how assistance should be given to communities, white-collar exploitation is more serious since it attempts to marginalize local knowledge, brain-wash communities into accepting alien ideas and ensures "participation" only in those activities where the agendas of external agents are underscored. Here, the GMSL is in the process of formulating guidelines for community disaster management modeling that is tight enough to prevent hi-jacking by external influences. |
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Additionally, the GMSL will be using is formidable grass-roots presence to conduct analysis and research into subject specific areas, disaster risk reduction and response. This will feed into the national disaster management effort. Further, there is a definite shift in thinking in the areas of "training and education" where the GMSL rejects the idea of "top-down" (power differential based) education and chooses the far more holistic, sustainable and effective method of "learning and sharing" with the ultimate choice of selection of a particular means of addressing a problem is completely in the hands of the primary stakeholder.
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Finally, with respect to the recovery stage of disasters, the DMIP will address emergency responses but only assist other agents within the GMSL and the country in mid-term and long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction.
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