Tried and tested – Making IDDRR a year-round initiative!
The International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction (IDDRR) is marked every 13th of October since 1989 when the day was set and adopted by the United Nations Assembly to raise awareness about disasters. Every year, a new theme is announced by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) to guide the year's engagements for organizations across the globe. UNDRR is the assigned focal point for disaster risk reduction (DRR) in the United Nations System.
Disasters cast a pervasive shadow over communities worldwide, impacting everyone, with children and youth bearing a disproportionate burden due to diverse barriers. According to the 2021 Global Youth Report on Protecting Young People in Civic Space by the Office of the Secretary-General's Envoy on Youth, over 80% of young people are faced with barriers and threats that span the sociocultural, financial, political, legal, digital, and physical barriers against engaging within the civic space.
Many IDDRR events have been conducted virtually in the last couple of years due to the post-COVID-19 pandemic period. As a Project Officer in SEM, tasked with supporting the 2024 IDDRR implementation, Terry Otieno, thought of a way to revamp IDDRR engagement. Terry was engaged as a youth leader for several years before becoming a Project Officer at the Stakeholder Engagement Mechanism (SEM). This touch with children and youth made Terry want to maximize the commemoration of IDDRR. She tried to find a way to reach many young people far and wide but to also generate multiple and diverse opportunities to do so. Meeting this objective meant organizing several events across the year instead of one event in October but she knew if she did it by myself, she would risk having numbers met without substantive engagement. While her network would adequately provide access to hundreds of youths directly and thousands indirectly, she still had the problem of quality engagement.
UNDRR created SEM to provide a space for non-state DRR actors to engage in supporting the implementation of the Sendai Framework and advocate for DRR in wider spaces. Various organizations in SEM provide a great avenue for partnership and at the same time, there are 5 UNDRR regional offices which made collaboration with each one possible. Terry leveraged this partnership avenue to bring in substantive engagement. She embarked on reaching out to prospective entities for partnership by January 2024.
A hybrid sensitization forum
On Tuesday, 30th April 2024, a hybrid sensitization forum was organized in Nairobi, Kenya to empower youth with knowledge and skills enabling them to contribute actively to developing disaster-resilient initiatives to observe the IDDRR on 13th October 2024. This forum was a result of a partnership between the UNDRR Head Office, UNDRR - Regional Office of Africa (ROA), SEM, and Youth4Nature.
The forum was a full-day event with 4 plenary sessions that discussed various DRR aspects and expounded on the 2024 IDDRR theme. There was an in-person attendance of 75 participants (41 Male & 34 Female) and up to 40 virtual attendees in each plenary session.
The participants laid the groundwork for some incredible event ideas for the week of 13th October! The hope was that this week would be unforgettable with impactful activities, including an IDDRR march, a digital video competition explaining DRR concepts using real-world scenarios, a mitigation and resilience-inspiring art exhibition, consultations sensitizing DRR at the community levels, and board games ie scramble word puzzles for creating DRR concepts among many more. During the forum, a gap was identified due to a lack of proper understanding of DRR concepts.
Virtual training on DRR
On Thursday, 29th August 2024, a two-hour virtual webinar was organized in partnership with UNDRR ROA, SEM, and the Africa Youth Advisory Board. The webinar's objective was to describe key DRR concepts to allow young people to have a better understanding and knowledge of DRR. It had 93+ participants from across the globe.
Youth art competition and art exhibition
One of the suggested activities during the IDDRR sensitization forum was having an art competition and exhibition focusing on DRR. Yet again, a partnership would provide a way to have these activities. As it happened, several UNDRR Regional Platforms were to happen in 2024. A collaboration between UNDRR ROA, SEM, and the Africa Youth Advisory Board facilitated and ran an art competition that received 250+ entries by the submission deadline - Friday, 13th September 2024.
The winner of the art competition, Racheal Musiimenta from Uganda, was awarded a fully funded trip to Windhoek, Namibia, to attend the Africa Region Platform on DRR from 21 - 24, October 2024. At the same time, 30 DRR-related art pieces were selected to be showcased during the RP in Windhoek, Namibia.
Virtual webinar: overview of the IDDRR toolkit and Are You Ready? campaign
On 9th October 2024, the UNDRR Head Office, Sendai Children & Youth, and SEM organized a webinar titled 'IDDRR 2024: Empower the Next Generation for a Resilient Future' that provided the 50 + participants with an overview of the UNDRR-developed IDDRR toolkit and Are You Ready? Campaign.
The webinar can be watched here. The passcode is: X5kT*!h*