Sylhet city, in northeastern Bangladesh, experiences heavy rainfall almost every year, causing large-scale disruption to everyday life. But in early October last year, when seasonal rains grew ever more ferocious and threatened to drown the city yet again, a youth volunteer group sprang into action, alerting and evacuating local residents to safety, starting with the most vulnerable.
However, saving people from the surging waters proved a daunting challenge. To reach those people likely to be stranded, they needed to weave through a maze of myriad alleys that have become narrower over the years as the rapacious need to urbanize has eaten into every free space. This ancient city, an important center of Islam during the Mughal reign, has grown at a frenzied pace in recent years with scant regard for planning. Moreover, the young volunteers belonged to a part of the city that is very densely populated, with a crumbling infrastructure.
The group had come together following a mobilisation campaign by Islamic Relief, an international non-governmental organisation, working under the umbrella of the National Alliance for Risk Reduction and Response Initiative (NARRI). A coalition of eight NGOs, NARRI has been working to strengthen disaster preparedness and risk reduction efforts in Bangladesh for several years. It is funded by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO) under its worldwide disaster preparedness programme, DIPECHO.
The youth group formed part of their community’s disaster management committee, which was also established by Islamic Relief. The idea was to empower the community to manage its own risks. A member of this committee also represented the community at the local administration to ensure that their concerns were addressed by the government.
In addition, Islamic Relief organised these young volunteers into teams responsible for early warning, search and rescue, and first aid. They also engaged them in mock drills and encouraged them to set up buffer stocks of essential materials and to create a disaster contingency fund.
Eventually, as often happens, the most affected were also the first responders. These enthusiastic youths swiftly assembled as they began to realise that their area would soon be under water. After a quick meeting with their community disaster management committee’s chief, they organised themselves into their respective teams and fanned out in different directions. They called out to people to gather in the designated safe area of their community and helped to transport vulnerable people such as the elderly and disabled to safety. And while they waited at the safe shelter for the threat to pass, the emergency fund as well as the food grain stocks helped them survive.
“This response by the volunteers with their own resources is an excellent community initiative”, says Syed Shahnawaz Ali, Head of Climate & Disaster Resilience Department of Islamic Relief. “This is a great example showing that people can come together during emergencies to help themselves. NARRI’s objective is that this model now be institutionalized, so that communities across the country become more resilient to the natural disasters that regularly afflict them”.
By Islamic Relief