Community Disaster Resilience Fund

Update

A field test of the Community Disaster Resilience Fund (CDRF) is currently underway with GROOTS and the National Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction NGOs in India. The project team held initial community consultations in the three states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh between May and August 2008 and formed a CDRF Advisory Group among NADRR partners in October 2008.

More recently Swayam Shikshan Prayog and Knowledge Links, on behalf of NADRR, hosted a two day participatory workshop on the 9th and 10th of December with potential NGO partners (implementing organizations for the Community Fund) in order to share and co-create the operational design of the Fund and to receive ideas from experienced NGOs as to how they see the concept and design of this fund. Notes from the planning workshop are available at the NADRR website.

Further pilots with the Red Cross are planned in the coming months. In addition the ProVention Consortium is initiating a series of further feasibility studies to analyze the “trickle-down” of existing international resources to community actors and to test donor interest.

Description

Since the idea was raised at the UN/ISDR Global Platform meeting in June 2007, ProVention has been exploring the establishment of the CDRF to provide small grants for strengthening community-led disaster risk reduction. The focus of the CDRF will be on seeding successful models for disaster risk reduction and scaling them up to promote safer communities.

The CDRF will also provide a mechanism for donors to provide significant support to community-level action on risk reduction in a way that complements the traditional programming activities of NGOs, governments, and international organizations.

The CDRF is planned as a broad multi-partner initiative, involving a variety of civil society, governmental, and private sector partners in program advisory, project selection and implementation roles. Initial planning and development of the concept has been led by ProVention, GROOTS, and the Huairou Commission.

The CDRF is also being developed in concert with the IFRC-led Global Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction (GADRR) to strengthen local capacities for building safer and more resilient communities. The CDRF will provide a distributed grant mechanism for the GADRR as well as a platform for sharing experience and knowledge among community organizations active in disaster risk reduction.

The CDRF concept note provides additional details about the fund.

Outputs & events

Key outputs from this activity have included the following:

  • Initiation of a test of the CDRF concept with GROOTS and the NADRR in India.

The CDRF is a critical component within ProVention’s Strategy for 2009-2015 to support the development and scaling up of local platforms for disaster risk reduction.

Next Steps

  • Continue test of community fund in India.
  • Initiate additional test with the IFRC.
  • Develop global steering committee.