Community capacity building still required for resilience - Sujoy Chaudhury

"We need to devote time and attention to finding out how we can provide at-scale capacity development of communities to manage their own risks and vulnerabilities." - Sujoy Chaudhury, Development Practitioner, Kolkata, India 

An important initiative - hopefully this will buck the trend of practitioners moving on to the next disaster, without having the opportunity to look back at what worked and what did not during the last big one. The Indian Ocean Tsunami has perhaps been one of those events that garnered the largest attention worldwide and consequently has been documented extensively.

As a development practioners and concerned with the negative impacts of disasters on development, the tsunami was for me an opportunity to see how the experts could move from response to rehabilitation and to resilience in the best way possible and without doubt much has been done to alleviate the sufferings of those who were directly impacted by the tsunami. I am however not sure how the issues of risk reduction or vulnerability reduction have been addressed. Can we assume now after 10 years that were a similar or bigger tsunami strike the same people, the impact will be lesser. Early warnings have become better and as many lives might not be lost - but would these communities have the resilience to recover on their own and by communities, I do mean the entire spectrum of people in the system including people responsible for DM.

I would like to hazard a guess that in such an event, we would be back to square one. We simply have not found out the ways and means by which vulnerable communities can be taught to manage their risks and vulnerabilities. This is an area of concern and we need to devote time and attention to finding out answers to how we can provide at scale, capacity development of communities to manage their own risks and vulnerabilities.

My wishes with all those who remember the day for the loss the day brought to their lives and pray that we do not get to witness something similar at least in this lifetime.