Seoul – Typhoons, earthquakes and other disasters are occurring with increasing frequency around the world. Governments and humanitarian workers constantly need to strengthen their ability to respond when disaster hits. 

This week, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) mission in the Republic of Korea (ROK) hosted a two-day workshop on Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction (CBDRR). The event took place on March 13–14 in Seoul and was led by two trainers from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the Netherlands Red Cross Partners for Resilience (PfR). A total of 33 humanitarian practitioners and ROK government officials attended the event. 

“As Korean humanitarian workers’ engagement in crisis abroad has been strengthened in recent decades, many are deployed to disaster-prone regions every year including the Philippines during the typhoon and Indonesia after the tsunami,” noted Mihyung Park, Head of IOM ROK office. 

“That is why IOM ROK organized this training. It aims to provide an opportunity for the participants to apply CBDRR skill sets to mitigate the community’s susceptibility to crisis and ensure effective coordination between community members and aid organizations,” she added.  

CBDRR is a systematic approach that focuses on the community’s needs, geography, and social environment to increase local resilience and reduce vulnerability at times of disasters.  

The two trainers leading the event – Sanna Paulina Salmela-Eckstein, Regional DRR Coordinator and Climate Change Focal Point of IFRC’s Asia-Pacific Regional Office, and Sandra Romero, Country Lead of the PfR in the Philippines – provided a comprehensive overview of CBDRR and practical knowledge for community risk assessment, CBDRR plan formulation, and its implementation. 

The training was conducted in a participatory manner; the process of CBDRR programming was elaborated, in order to enhance participants’ understanding of the roles and responsibilities in response to disasters and recovery operations. Sharing experiences and lessons learned from field operations, the participants discussed how they can assess and act on expected risks through disaster preparedness, Early Warning System (EWS), and CBDRR measures. 

“There was a high degree of interest around understanding the key CBDRR processes, analysing case studies, and establishing a framework for monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Through the group exercises, I hope that the participants have learned the CBDRR approach to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from the impacts of disasters,” said IFRC’s Sanna Paulina Salmela-Eckstein.  

The workshop was organized as part of IOM ROK’s capacity-building project for Korean humanitarian actors, funded by the USAID Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). Since 2015, IOM ROK has provided a wide range of humanitarian trainings including Data Analysis and Management Training and Gender-Based Violence Workshop. 

Further information on Disaster Risk Reduction visit: https://www.iom.int/disaster-risk-reduction 

For more information please contact IOM ROK, Mihyung Park, Tel: +82 70 4820 2781, Email: mipark@iom.int or Jumi Kim, Tel: +82 (0)70 4820 0292, Email: jukim@iom.int