Humanitarian actions in emergency situations.

CRGR | CENTRAL AMERICA | 29 SEPT. Within the framework of the project «Strengthening local, national and regional networks for disaster management in four Central American countries» financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Regional Coordination for Risk Management developed from 18 to 22 September in Antigua Guatemala the Regional Courses of Action Without Damage and Strategic Management of Risk.

This initiative was designed to increase the organizational level through enhancing capacities in emergency humanitarian actions, while helping to strengthen capacities for disaster planning and response work, using the different tools of work that the CRGR has been developing.

According to Giovanni Magaña, regional program coordinator for the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and facilitating the No-harm Action course, the objective of this high-level training was focused on improving the capacities of civil society organizations in four Central American countries that suffer from multi-risk socio-natural phenomena. It also supports strengthening the leadership of the people of the CRGR for joint action at the local, national and regional levels and thus enhancing a level of proposal for appropriate humanitarian actions in a timely manner in emergency situations.

Likewise, the approach taken in these courses was to rescue the successful experiences of the National Risk Management Boards that work on the subject, together with the knowledge and norms that the academy contributes from the scientific knowledge, in order to have decision makers with tools and methods that allow him to decide in conditions of extreme pressure.

For the Executive Secretary of the CRGR, Wilson Galo with this course begins a training process aimed at strengthening capacities in the humanitarian teams on Action without Harm, aiming to ensure that all humanitarian actors working from the local to the regional in the CRGR have the tool and the training to be able to make an intervention that does not generate collateral damages.

«Many of the interventions of projects related to risk management continue to cause damages to the communities and the people who participate in the response and it is for them that we have considered since the CRGR to enable tools to be used in all the National Tables that intervene in the communities, «said Wilson Galo.

According to Pablo Maldonado, the University Network of Latin America and the Caribbean for Disaster Risk Reduction (REDULAC) and facilitator of the Strategic Risk Management Course with this training, it was sought to prepare the representatives of each country members of the CRGR with the advice of the risk management of any type or nature, the components of the same and its application in each of its countries, as well as on the best practices of Risk Management of current use at international level.

And in this way, be able to design and implement the Strategic Risk Management according to the characteristics and needs of each of their countries.

«The objective of this course was to present to the participants how a strategic risk management is done. This implies factors such as corrective, prospective, reactive management and, in the specific case of a transformative management methodology,» said Pablo Maldonado.

As one of the results of the Strategic Risk Management course was the development of a matrix in the Sendai Framework that may be applicable both to the region where gaps, challenges and activities that can be done to comply with this framework were identified. action. This exercise will allow visualizing the different actions that are seen in each of the countries of Central America and also that can be applied not only at the country level but at the level of institutions and communities.

These regional courses are endorsed by the academy under the agreement with the Center for Studies on Safe Development and Disasters of the University of San Carlos of Guatemala and will be replicated by each delegation in each of their countries, in order to get knowledge and practice from member organizations to communities.

During these courses, leaders and leaders of the National Risk Management Tables were formed, the Citizen Convergence for Risk Management COCIGER – Guatemala, Permanent Table for Risk Management MPGR- El Salvador, National Table of Risk Management MNIGR- Honduras and the National Table for Risk Management MNGR – Nicaragua.

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