People and Disasters

This report describes an ACHR and IIED sponsored seminar on the subject of “Communities as key actors in disaster rehabilitation,” which was held on November 3, 2008, during the fourth World Urban Forum, in Nanjing, China.

The idea of organizing this seminar in Nanjing forum was not only to bring out the people-driven disaster rehabilitation processes that have been going on in many Asian countries, but to re-emphasize in a big, international forum that making communities the key actors should be an important principle in all kinds of development work which involves the poor and poor communities – not only disasters.

The seminar was also a chance for the group which plays the most vital and primary role in working out lasting solutions to Asia’s most urgent problems of poverty and housing – the poor themselves - to meet each other, to speak about their experiences and to be heard. The absence of this most central voice in the change-making process continues to skew the quality of our understanding and undermine the sustainability of our development planning and policymaking.

So this little seminar was organized a bit differently, and it was our attempt to bring the people - who represent the real army of development workers after any disaster, and who should be the real owners of any development or rehabilitation process - to present their experiences and their ideas themselves, in their own way.