Strengthening disaster prevention and resilience: developing media and NGO capacity to increase awareness among communities in the Indian states of West Bengal and Orissa.
Start date: December 2007
End date: March 2009
Media types: radio, print and television
Issue: Humanitarian
Country: India
The Trust is implementing a pilot project that aims to strengthen the culture of disaster prevention and preparedness in these two states by encouraging local media to have increased coverage of disaster risk reduction issues on a regular basis.
This 15-month initiative will strive to improve attitudes of journalists and media institutions towards disaster risk reduction issues for greater visibility of these issues; to enable the NGOs and government officers to develop effective relationships with media for communicating to their the communities; to enable radio professionals to design and produce effective public service announcements.
The various activities that will be implemented during this 15-month pilot project have been planned following discussions with representatives from media, NGOs and government in the two states.
The activities will include:
Capacity building
Training workshops will be held for representatives of media, NGOs, government officers and radio professionals in Orissa and West Bengal.
Five-day workshops will be conducted for 15 print and broadcast journalists and for 15 NGO representatives concurrently to allow for interactions; 1-3 day workshops for 15 government officials in each state to enable them to handle media more effectively; 3 day workshop for equipping 16 radio professionals from the two states for designing radio advertisements on disaster preparedness.
These workshops will be followed by refresher workshops for all the above, later in the year.
Media outputs
Radio public service announcements communicating key messages related to disaster preparedness and risk reduction will be produced and disseminated through the local media in the target states.
Raising awareness
Seminars and events will be held to encourage interactions between senior representatives of media, NGOs, government and other stakeholders to raise awareness of issues related to disaster risk reduction.
Working in partnership
The pilot initiative is supported by the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO) disaster preparedness programme (DIPECHO) and also by Save the Children, Bal Rakha, Bharat.