VANUATU – An Australian aid group says its work preparing Vanuatu communities before Cyclone Pam paid off and there needs to be more investment in refresher courses and support for such schemes.

Care Australia has reported back on its work before last year’s devastating cyclone to coincide with International Disaster Risk Reduction Day today.

It found that early warning of a disaster alone is not enough and emergency information needs to come from a trusted source.

Care’s country director for Vanuatu, Megan Chisholm, said communities also need to know how to interpret the information.

“In the communities where we worked on programmes before the cyclone we had trained a number of community members to understand the alerts – those people had a clear role and responsibility in that community and the community respected and listened to them.”

Chisholm said communities fared better where women had been empowered to take on leadership roles in disaster.

“Through our disaster risk reduction programmes we were helping women to take up leadership roles on things like community disaster committees.

“We were training women to understand cyclone tracking maps, training them to understand how to prepare their communities so they could better engage in helping their community when the cyclone hit.

“And what we found is that in communities where we had worked with men and women, they were much more effective in preparing for the disaster as a community. They all worked together.

“Women looked after certain roles. They looked after sick people, they looked after the children, they went to the garden and they made sure they prepared all of the food beforehand.

“They made sure they had food to survive after the cyclone, they kept people safe in safe houses and they played different roles.

“Whereas in communities where we had not worked on disaster risk reduction, women’s roles were not as strong. There were examples where women heard the cyclone alerts and wanted to go into the garden and prepare food but the men didn’t believe them and didn’t think a cyclone was coming and so didn’t let them prepare and they were much less effective.

“So we found that involving women in disaster risk reduction helped women move into more leadership roles and helped empower women to play stronger roles in the community over time but it also makes the preparation and response to an emergency much more effective.”

One of Care’s findings was that cyclone warning emergency information needed to come from a trusted source.

“Yes, it could be leaders, also people need to have a trusted source, so it might be a leader in the community, it might be a partner they work with or a government representative that they know but – they also, people also need to understand what the information means,” Chisolm said.

“In the communities where we worked on programmes before the cyclone we had trained a number of disaster community members to understand the alerts and when the information came those people had a clear role and responsibility in that community and the community respected and listened to them.

“So men and women received information from the radio, from the government, from Care staff as well – we were on the phone to them as the alerts were coming – and they had that information and they believed it and they went out and they organised their communities and they got their communities into safe houses.

“People listened to them because they’d been empowered to take that organising role. In communities where there’d been no disaster risk reduction they heard the alerts on the radio, they might have got some phone calls from some family in Port Vila who were getting the information but they didn’t take it seriously.

“They said, ‘we haven’t had a cyclone for years, we don’t really think it’s coming’ and so they didn’t listen and they didn’t prepare for the emergency based on the alert.” -RNZI