Challenges Faced by Humanitarian agency in Emergency Response in Urban areas: Lessons from Haiti and Chile
Challenges Faced by Humanitarian agency in Emergency Response in Urban areas: Lessons from Haiti and Chile
Challenges Faced by Humanitarian agency in Emergency Response in Urban areas: Lessons from Haiti and Chile
Introduction
1. The 19th and early 20th centuries, urbanization resulted from and contributed to industrialization. New job opportunities in the cities spurred the mass movement of surplus population away from the countryside. At the same time, migrants provided cheap, plentiful labor for the emerging factories. The present time world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in the history. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will be living in towns and cities. By 2030 this number will swell to almost 5 billion, with urban growth concentrated in Africa and Asia. While mega-cities have captured much public attention, most of the new growth will occur in smaller towns and cities, which have fewer resources to respond to the magnitude of the change. Urban growth, which is mostly due to natural increase, is unavoidable. In principle, cities offer a more favorable setting for the resolution of social and environmental problems than rural areas. Cities generate jobs and income. With good governance, they can deliver education, health care and other services more efficiently than less densely settled areas simply because of their advantages of scale and proximity. However, the speed and size of the growth are not fixed, and vary widely among regions.
Migration is a significant contributor to urbanization, as people move in search of social and economic opportunity. According to World Bank’s flagship Development Report 2010, it has been said that “Half the world’s people now live in cities, a share that will rise to 70 percent by 2050,” said the World Bank report, citing UN Population Fund statistics. “Of urban population growth (5 million new residents a month), 95 percent will be in the developing world, with small cities growing fastest”. Environmental degradation and conflict may drive people off the land. Often people who leave the countryside to find better lives in the city have no choice but to settle in shantytowns and slums, where they lack access to decent housing and sanitation, health care and education. The more densely populated and more diverse a community is the more accentuated characteristics can be associated with urbanism. Urbanism causes decrease in per capita, and promotes urban violence, political instability, crime and aggressive behavior. Rapid population growth also responsible for poverty in urban areas. Another major issue being created by this social problem is the breaking of the traditional family structure. Our cities in especially in 3 rd world countries are not working well. Sanitation, safety, transportation, housing, education and even electricity are failing. So these urban areas become more vulnerable to any disaster because of its weak structures and poor service utility. During peace time because of frequently displacement of people within an urban areas makes job difficult for the humanitarian agencies to map the vulnerable group of people as a part of urban risk reduction process. Most humanitarian efforts and aid have been focused on rural development rather than the needs of the urban poor. About 810 million people already live in city slums, battling overcrowding, insecure tenure, landslides, flooding, poor sanitation, unsafe housing, inadequate nutrition and poor health. Other than urban earthquake preparedness, humanitarian agencies have not yet focused on emergency response in urban areas with due attention. Recent earthquake in Chile and Haiti point out the weakness and the new challenges, faced by the humanitarian agencies during emergency response.
In our country the GOB has established the Ministry of Food and Disaster Management (MoFDM) as a national focal point for disaster management in Bangladesh. It manages disasters through its three agencies: Disaster Management Bureau (DMB), Directorate of Relief and Rehabilitation (DRR), and Directorate General of Food. As a part of disaster management plan the GOB could initiate draft disaster management act. And regarding the city or urban areas the GOB mainly emphasis the earthquake. The research works and contingency plans are developing mainly based on structural point of view like collapse of building and traffics system, recovery etc. and less emphasis given on the non structural side. These are like physiological effect of the people, political complexity, violence and crime, social cohesion, and fluidity of people. So it needs to develop the urban disaster plan and its legal framework. And professionally act in emergency response phase to face those challenges which we had learnt from Haiti and Chile earthquake.
This study mainly looks for the root causes of those challenges which are faced by the humanitarian agencies during emergency