Indonesia - Building Community Resilience through Disaster Education

Organization(s): Consortium for Disaster Education (CDE)

Country(ies): Indonesia

Primary thematic focus: Other capacity development focus

In a Nutshell:
As Indonesia is one of the most prone countries to disasters, DRR efforts have to be implemented in a systematic and holistic approach. It has to be integrated into development process including on education. Thus, mainstreaming DRR into national education system is a must to build the capacity of community.

The Story:
Indonesia is a country with great potential to sustain geologic, biologic, hydrometeorologic, environmental, technological and social disasters. Global climate change has also begun to show its effects in Indonesia. Therefore, there is an urgent need for proliferation of DRR program in Indonesia.

Huge losses from disasters force Indonesia to spend huge amounts of funds for emergency response, rehabilitation and reconstruction that reduce the much needed resources for development. The impacts of these disasters increase people’s vulnerability, poverty, and dependency on external help.

The preparedness of the government and the people of Indonesia in terms of understanding and taking initiate steps to reduce the risk of disasters could be avoided by having DRR efforts implemented in a systematic and holistic manner, as part of development. Improving the country’s resilience and independence in dealing with disaster risks down to the grass root level is key for Indonesia to be able to save the fruits of development from potential annihilation.

For several years, various institutions and organizations including governments departments have tried to insert disaster education including teaching materials on disaster into local contents, training for teachers, campaigns and advocacy to school road shows to conduct simulation drills in schools. However, these activities were not coordinated well and not integrated into a common framework agreed by all parties concerned.

In the effort of developing and strengthening education and public awareness programmes to make development/disasters linkages be understood, and preparing variety of actions needed on risk reduction, UNDP-Safer Community through Disaster Risk Reduction (SC-DRR) project has formulated zero draft of the National Strategy on Mainstreaming DRR into national education system. CDE, being the only coordination mechanism in Indonesia for multistakeholders on disaster education conducting campaign and DRR education is SC-DRR partner on advocating the draft strategy.

The main role of CDE on development of the draft national strategy is to review the draft prepared by SC-DRR to be formulated as a more representative strategy accommodating the needs and interests of diverse stakeholders particularly civil society. For this purpose, CDE conducted a series of national and regional workshops for field level, activities to outreach public and stakeholders, develop and facilitate the activities CDE task force for development of the strategy, and consolidate with government task force on reviewing and developing a newly improved document based on the document prepared by SC-DRR. Between March to July 2009 CDE conducted seven workshops: three in Jakarta, one each in Semarang, Makassar, Maumere, and Manokwari (geographically considered to be able to cover multistakeholders from various parts of Indonesia).

Results and Critical Factors:
The fruit of all the hardwork was that the Government, in this case represented by the Ministry of National Education through the Directorate General for Basic and Middle Education Management, took the results of CDE’s work into their policy papers. In addition to that, the Ministry of National Education has committed to issue a government formal (ministerial decree) on mainstreaming DRR into national education system in January 2010. As an initial step to accelerate the process, they will issue a circular note to all the schools in Indonesia to mainstream DRR into their school activities. They have also committed to issue a ministerial decree with more powerful and legal acceptance for this issue. While the government has already aware of the importance of DRR mainstreaming into national education, CDE observes that the Ministry has not yet reached the level of embracing the idea in each and every level of it. Various directorate generals have their own activities with funding from various sources. Thus, even in one single ministry, there has been no single strategic approach to deal with the same issue.

Indonesia, with more than 300 districts and thousands of schools, has diverse capacity in terms of human resources, facilities, and DRR reference materials. CDE foresees huge challenges even for improving human resources on the issue of DRR knowledge and practices. Aware of CDE’s role as the only focal point for disaster risk reduction education and campaign, CDE will continue to advocate and build strategic initiative and coordination among stakeholders to develop awareness on disaster risk reduction which is able to drive actions, both individual and collective, to create disaster risk reduction culture. In the era of local autonomy, CDE realizes that the strength of proliferation of DRR program in Indonesia lies on the front liners at field level: the local government, provincial parliament, head masters, teachers, and students. Therefore, rigorous advocacy will need to be conducted to influence the decision makers, particularly at field level, to strongly have the same understanding on mainstreaming DRR into education system provoking them to take real actions through their decisions.

Name of Primary Contact Person: Ninil R M Jannah

Title of Primary Contact Person: Project Officer

City: Jakarta

File: National Strategy on Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction into Education System.doc