Challenge: In rural Nepal, earthquakes and landslides take a heavy toll.

After the 2015 earthquake, rural areas in Nepal wanted to prepare better. But pathways to set up or strengthen preparedness and prevention systems were unclear, due to the 2016 federalization of many disaster management services and the tangled International Non-Governmental Organization (INGO) landscape.

As a Luce fellow, I was working as the disaster risk management lead at a Nepali NGO.

In 2018, I was awarded a Luce Scholarship to work in community preparedness and disaster management in Asia. I spent the next year as the disaster management lead at PHASE Nepal, a Nepali organization on their community resilience program. The remit was wide and vague: in communities where my organization was supporting health, agriculture, and education, there was no disaster management support. So what might this look like?

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Approach | I organized and co-facilitated a focus group series to map hazards and triangulate pain points and priorities.

I started by defining the first stage of the problem. We knew that hazard risk was causing a range of issues in rural areas, but did not have a sense of community priorities. I set up a research and co-design plan including eight focus groups and community mapping exercises with people from rural villages who had been peer nominated for participation due to the active role they played in their communities. After seven months of relentless studying and constant practice with my very patient colleagues, I was able to co-facilitate these focus groups in Nepali.

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Design | We trained a search and rescue team and developed a training for disaster response in schools.

Search and rescue (SAR) emerged as a service gap that was causing a significant amount of stress. We worked with community members to choose a team to be trained for all-hazard search and rescue. Guided by this community-directed focus on SAR, we set up training sessions in several rural areas and trained emergency response teams across the Sindhupalchok District.

Teacher preparedness was another challenge that emerged from the focus groups and mapping exercises. Parents and teachers alike felt anxious about their knowledge and options if a severe earthquake were to strike while school was in session. Working with one of my colleagues who ran PHASE Nepal's education program, I developed and co-delivered a disaster readiness training program for teachers in the rural Gorkha and Sindhupalchok districts.

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