Reflections from an EU-CORD Webinar
A note as we share this piece: We publish this reflection in the shadow of the catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-China border, triggered by a glacial lake outburst, which has claimed well over a thousand lives with many more still missing. Our sadness and our prayers are with everyone caught up in it — those who have lost family, homes and livelihoods, and the responders working in extraordinarily difficult conditions. It is a painful, immediate reminder of exactly the kind of hazard this webinar’s speakers spoke about: the urgent need for early warning that communities trust, understand and can act on before disaster strikes, not only after. We hold this discussion, and this loss, together.
A truly global room
Fifty-eight participants logged on, with country introductions in the chat mapping a network that stretched from Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, South Sudan, the DRC, Burundi, Rwanda and Somalia, to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Australia.
The webinar was the third in the Faith, Climate and Environment Group’s series, co-hosted by Christian Neuman (Strømme) and Nico Smith (Dorcas). The next session, on green economy and climate-smart agriculture, is scheduled for Wednesday 2 December.
The speakers
- Juma Ignatius — Senior Policy Advisor, Climate Action, Disaster Risk Reduction and Anticipatory Action, World Vision International (Nairobi, Kenya)
- Dirk-Jan Otte — Advisor, Food Security and Livelihoods, Help a Child (Netherlands)
- Fitri Panjaitan Klaarenbeek — Programme Staff, Humanitarian Aid and Recovery Cluster, Dorcas
- Mathieu Gamba — Shelter, Infrastructure and DRR Technical Advisor, Medair (Lausanne, Switzerland)
Communities as the primary force, not the last resort
Juma Ignatius opened by setting out World Vision’s community-based disaster risk management (CBDRM) approach, built around a simple but often overlooked truth: disasters are experienced locally, so preparedness has to start there too. Communities are consistently the first responders to any crisis, yet risk within a community is never evenly distributed — children, women, people with disabilities and the poorest households each face different exposure, and programming has to reflect that rather than treat “the community” as a single, uniform group.
Central to World Vision’s model is its empowered worldview approach: rather than arriving with solutions, teams work from the premise that communities already hold knowledge, capacity and agency, and the role of an international organisation is to help activate it, not replace it. Faith leaders feature prominently in this model — as trusted messengers whose word travels further and faster than an outside agency’s, as conveners who bring together community structures and local authorities, and as a route into psychosocial support that communities are often more willing to seek from a pastor or imam than from an official. Evidence from World Vision’s programming shows that engaging faith leaders before a disaster, not only in its aftermath, produces markedly better outcomes.
Responding to a question on communicating risk to children without causing fear, Juma stressed that the answer lies in approach and language: involving children as agents of communication in their own right, and framing preparedness as awareness rather than alarm.
Making disaster risk reduction stick, in practice
Dirk-Jan Otte followed with grounded examples of what DRR mainstreaming looks like for Help a Child, across Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, the DRC, Malawi, Burundi and Rwanda. A community-identified need for an ambulance in a remote part of India, co-funded with local government; youth-produced energy-saving stoves that cut both deforestation and household fuel costs; tree nurseries in Malawi tackling landslides and erosion under the PIPP approach (developed with Wageningen University); mulching and contour lines protecting topsoil from flood-prone fields; and village-level task forces trained in early warning, evacuation, first aid and relief distribution, in one case co-funding a rescue boat with local authorities.
He put a candid question to the group: ‘with disability inclusion, gender, peacebuilding and environment all competing for space in programme design, how does DRR earn its place as more than a box-ticking exercise’? It’s a fair challenge, and one the network is well placed to keep working on together rather than each organisation solving alone.
Financing and the layered nature of risk
Fitri Panjaitan Klaarenbeek picked up that thread directly, reflecting on Dorcas’ experience of mainstreaming DRR into policy and — the harder part — into budgets. She noted that DRR and climate adaptation already carry the weight of global government commitments, including the Sendai Framework, now twenty years old; the ongoing challenge is translating that commitment into financing, including through public-private partnerships and blended finance. She also drew attention to the layered reality in many of the countries where Dorcas works, where climate risk rarely arrives on its own but is entangled with conflict, displacement and migration — meaning that risk analysis and the response that follows have to account for all of it at once.
Old signs, new science
Mathieu Gamba closed the presentations with an example of what combining traditional and modern early warning systems can look like in practice: a Medair project in north-east Madagascar, developed with Tech4Dev and a Swiss university partner, reaching around 53,000 people across three communities exposed to recurrent cyclones and floods.
The project’s starting point was consultation: communities’ own indicators — frogs calling more loudly, ducks moving inland, mango trees flowering early, changes in river colour and current — carry real, trusted meaning locally, but were being used inconsistently and were never linked to the modern meteorological tools used by government and international actors. Medair’s response has been to document these signs formally, with communities validating each one, translate materials into local languages beyond the official French and Malagasy, and build an indicators booklet mapping each sign to a timeline and to clear community roles for passing on the warning. The project is now approaching field testing to determine whether, in practice, traditional and scientific signals tell communities the same thing.
Looking ahead
Recordings and slides from the session will be shared with all who registered. The next Faith, Climate and Environment Group webinar takes place on Wednesday 2 December, focusing on green economy and climate-smart agriculture — with an invitation, as ever, to bring colleagues who would value the conversation.
Photo by Ethan Sees: https://www.pexels.com/photo/round-mirror-2853432/
