In the wake of the recent Cyclone Makkasan, Government officials from Myanmar were unable to attend the fourth session of the Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction (GPDRR), hosted in Geneva from 19 – 24 May 2013. To this end, ADPC’s Sudhir Kumar gave a presentation on behalf of the Myanmar’s Relief and Resettlement Department detailing the recent development of the county’s Disaster Management Course. This presentation was given on GPDRR’s IGNITE stage, a special venue where selected DRR topics, projects or initiatives are shared, with the aim of widening the scope of topics discussed at the Global Platform.

Creating a sustainable course

Funding for the consultation was provided primarily by the DRR Working Group, Myanmar which was set up for the purpose, including a number of DRR agencies including Care, UNDP, UN-Habitat, Oxfam, Action Aid. However, it was key to ensure that the DRR training course would still be viable once the external funding was no longer available.

To this end, a pool of 60 trainers were selected from various government departments and trained in the course. They were also involved in the development of the course, and their feedback was an important aspect of development, meaning that trainers could have a direct impact on what they were teaching, and raise any issues before the course contents were finalized. The involvement and training of this group of government officials was to ensure that there would be no scarcity of fully informed resource people once the DRR Working Group disbanded.

With a population of 56.52 million (2006-7) Myanmar is the biggest country in the mainland South-East Asia. With this in mind, officials were not only selected from the capital Nay Pyi Taw, located in central Myanmar, but also from the north and south of Myanmar. This means that there is wide distribution of knowledge across the country, cutting travel costs of resource persons.

The need for an updated course – no quick fixes

Myanmar already had a training course in place, targeted at building disaster management at a subnational level. However, this course, developed in 1977, needed to be revised in changing context . Myanmar’s risk profile has changed dramatically over the last 30 years, and a new course was needed to highlight and train people to deal with new issues pertaining to modern day Myanmar.To this end, an inter-ministerial committee worked with technical working group comprising members from the “DRR Working Group”. Members of this group met regularly over the course of a year, creating a course that was focused on issues relevant to Myanmar, and with time enough to thoroughly cover all aspects of DRR in Myanmar, as well as to address any problems that arose in the midst of the consultation.
It was important that the new DRR course was not a quickly updated version of the previous course, but a training program that fully took into account the intricacies of Myanmar’s risk profile and the realities of the DRRl landscape. The course that has resulted from this process is action oriented, with systems to support and improve disaster management at a subnational level, within individual townships. The course is flexible enough to address all local issues, as well as being focused and comprehensive, addressing a balance of local issues and national or global issues. The resulting course covers concepts and cross cutting issues which it then relates directly to response and then to recovery.

The future of the training course

Myanmar is vulnerable to a number of hazards, including earthquakes, cyclones and tsunami. In 2008, Cyclone Nargis led to death or disappearance of more than 120,000 people. It is therefore very important that sufficient people are trained to deal with any disaster that may hit. To this end, the course is provided in both English and local language, in order to be accessible to as many people as possible. The course is currently in implementation; there is a possibility that in the future that course may be adjusted to deal with the specific needs of each region of Myanmar. However, this updated course shows the dedication of the Government of Myanmar to tackling disaster management issues within the nation.

To see the presentation, click this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxneUQ_6Wtg

For more information, please contact Mr. Sudhir Kumar, Sr. PM, ADPC at sudhir@adpc.net