KOBE, Japan (AlertNet) -- Hamila, a widow and mother of two, lives in a lean-to in flood-prone southern Bangladesh. Rickety poles support what passes for a roof. She has three walls. Her floor is dirt – or more often mud.
“Look at the house in which she is living,” says Chowdhury Yusef, Bangladesh’s minister for food and disaster management. He points at a photo projected on a big screen. “It is an apology for a house.”
Yusef has brought Hamila’s photo to the U.N.-sponsored World Conference on Disaster Reduction in the Japanese city of Kobe to show attendees what it means to live with risk in Bangladesh. Hamila’s is the face of vulnerability.
“She has no assets, no land,” he tells a symposium. “She doesn’t have any skills, so naturally she is highly vulnerable to any sort of disaster, even on a minor scale. In fact, there are millions of poor people like Hamila in disaster-prone areas of Bangladesh.”
Bangladesh is one of the world’s most hazard-hit countries. Three great rivers pour into the delta zone that comprises most of the country. Flooding is frequent and severe. Eighty percent of the population live on agriculture in the delta, with a thousand people crammed into every square kilometre.
In 2004, flooding engulfed a staggering 61 percent of Bangladesh, affecting 35 million people. Nearly a million homes were damaged and almost 2 million acres of crops destroyed.
The troubles don’t stop there. Most of Bangladesh’s 140 million people are also vulnerable to cyclones, tornadoes, drought and even earthquakes. Cyclones killed 130,000 people in 1991 and made a million families homeless.
“The people have become relief-oriented,” Yusef says. “Every time, they ask for relief, and relief, and relief.”
The government spends about $35 million a year on providing 700,000 tonnes of grain to vulnerable Bangladeshis. Increasingly, it is tackling the root causes of vulnerability in a country where per-capita annual income is a meagre $450.
“No amount of relief and response will help because they are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and disaster,” Yusef says.
In an attempt to break the cycle, the government has introduced the Natural Disaster Risk Reduction Programme, aimed at 800,000 families and costing $14 million.
It includes a massive public awareness project to teach people what to do when hazards strike, and a programme to help families develop household business plans to ensure their livelihoods are not swept away.
It also involves the training of agents for social change – teachers, imams, folk singers – who go out into their communities as volunteers to build skills and put household risk-management plans into place.
The trick is to empower the poor and fuse risk reduction with development goals.
“The challenge is the changing of the mindset of the policymakers, at the local level, the national level and the international-community level,” Yusef says.
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