We need to support the next generation of risk management researchers and professionals to broaden their understanding about risk communication. Many of them are working in silos within their own disciplines and need opportunities to think about how scientific information can be communicated to those who need it most.

So, together with a team of young professionals at the  and a host of supporting organisations - GFDRR, , , and  - I led the development of a 24-hour Interdisciplinary Pressure Cooker event on risk communication at the  in Mexico City. We wanted to push the boundaries of young professionals and researchers and challenged them to work together in interdisciplinary teams to devise risk communication solutions for real-life case studies in Mexico.

Once we selected the lucky 35 participants to join the event, we had the difficult task of devising a risk communication challenge that they could complete in 24 hours. Given the unique nature of the event, it sparked huge interest from a range of organisations. Before we knew it, we had support from risk communication specialists all over the world including the UK Environment Agency, Â鶹ԼÅÄ Media Action, British Geological Survey, Rural Livelihood Risk Management Consulting, Resurgence, and Universities of Plymouth and Reading. A few teleconference calls later, themes emerged on how to frame the risk communication challenges for our two case studies – urban flooding, subsidence and resettlement challenges  and coastal flooding and environmental degradation .

Firstly, we wanted to encourage the participants to really focus on the importance of understanding the audience by conducting . We wanted to provide them with as much local knowledge as possible to do this effectively but we struggled to find information on psychographics of the population in the case studies. Instead we decided to conduct  to give the participants insights into how different people think about risk.

Secondly, we wanted to emphasise the importance of identifying the expected change the risk communication output would actually lead to. This could be changes in the way the audience, think, feel or behave in relation to the risks they are exposed to. For example, would the communication strategy change people's knowledge (understanding the likelihood of a hazard), attitudes (willingness to take risk seriously), or practices (having an emergency kit at home)?

We recognised it would be hard to really identify the impact in such a short amount of time without fieldwork and assessments with the communities at risk so instead we brought in specialists with lots of experience of working with the communities in the case study areas to provide feedback to the teams about their approaches throughout the day.

During the event the teams really engaged with the challenge to think about their target audience and felt the connection between their risk communication solutions and how this would influence their target groups. One participant, Eduardo, a Civil Engineering student from Mexico, found that the most challenging thing about the event was “picturing the people we were talking about in the study case, so we never forgot that even though it was an hypothetical challenge, it was real people.” The information videos and case study specialists were vitally important for the teams.

The team working on a challenge related to subsidence in Iztapalapa conducted their audience profiling exercise to understand the motivations, drivers, routines, constraints and vulnerabilities of a representative young mother, called Rosa. Their solution ‘‘The Rosa Project” focused on training vulnerable women, like Rosa, to transform them into agents of change in their community.

Upon reflection after the event, time constraints meant that the teams did spend a lot of time thinking about the audience and less time detailing the specific elements of their risk communication solution. Ideally with more time both could have been achieved.

The day after the event we brought the participants to visit the Iztapalapa case study and talk to a resident. The participants really enjoyed this experience and were already thinking about how to tailor their solutions based on this new insight.

Overall the challenge was very successful in highlighting the importance of keeping people at the heart of everything that is done in relation to risk communication. It was a huge learning point for participants who have never done this kind of exercise before. For example, Tyler a PhD candidate from New Zealand indicated that after the event he “will spend more time thinking from the user perspective and returning to the user personas.”

I’m really looking forward to supporting more events like this with the Water Youth Network and learning about others’ experiences of risk communication.

Lydia Lydia Cumiskey is the Disaster Risk Reduction Team Coordinator for Water Youth Network

Our world is home to . The majority of these 10 to 24-year-olds live in Asia, with 48 million alone growing up in Bangladesh.  

And many of these young people are having sex. Bangladesh has one of the highest adolescent fertility rates in all of South Asia, coming in at . This is compared to a figure of 71 for Afghanistan and Nepal, which share the next highest adolescent birth rate in the region. In the US, this number stands at 21, in the UK, 14.

In Bangladesh, this high birth rate is driven by girls . Nearly three quarters of married Bangladeshi women become wives before turning 18 – compared to fewer than 3% of men. Media Action carried out research with adolescents, parents and teachers to better understand why. 

Outside of everyone’s comfort zone

We found that children and adults alike struggle to talk about sexual and reproductive health (SRH) in Bangladesh, .

Teenagers are embarrassed to seek out advice from their elders, due to social stigma and shyness. We also learned that parents don’t start these conversations either – aside from the heart-to-hearts mothers have with their daughters about periods.

SRH is a taboo topic, which parents feel is inappropriate to bring up with adolescents before they get married. Our research revealed that adults believe that telling teenagers about contraceptives promotes promiscuity.

As for teachers, they are often evasive and are known to sometimes skip the chapters on sexual and reproductive health in textbooks. Those we interviewed said they faced social barriers in discussing sex with students of the opposite gender to themselves. They also didn’t feel properly supported by their colleagues and management to have these kinds of conversations.

Educators are also discouraged by students’ reluctance to discuss sex with them in the classroom. Some NGOs run SRH programmes in schools but teenagers we spoke with said that these paint an incomplete picture of what they need to know.

Recognising these issues, by providing universal access to information and services. Girls are being taught . But this isn’t enough.

Getting the lowdown

Adolescents are unsurprisingly hungry to know more about the experiences they all have, but which are never spoken about.

This is where the radio show (Crossroads at 10 to 19) comes in. Combining drama, songs and interviews with both experts and ordinary teenagers, Dosh Unisher Mor aimed to give young people the comprehensive lowdown on SRH they crave. 

The show helped teenagers come to terms with the physical and psychological changes that go with puberty, by presenting these as natural and nothing to be ashamed of. Adolescent listeners said they learned new things from the show, particularly about the physical changes they were experiencing. For example, the programme corrected the mistaken belief, held by many of the boys we spoke to, that wet dreams are a disease.

The show also helps adolescents realise just how traumatic early marriage can be for girls. Listeners came to understand that getting pregnant at a young age puts mothers – and their babies – at risk of health complications and even death.

Some explicitly said that Dosh Unisher Mor led them to see early marriage as a damaging social convention they had the responsibility to protest against. One girl was even driven to stop a child marriage from happening – telling her parents about it, who in turn informed the police.

Filling the information gap through entertainment

Teenagers appreciated that Dosh Unisher Mor was not only educational, but also entertaining. They saw it as a show with the power to change attitudes and influence people by facilitating open and natural discussions, informed by detailed and comprehensive explanations.

As for parents, many said the show encouraged them and their children to speak more openly about these issues. Though we did interview some who explicitly said they were happier for their children to listen to Dosh Unisher Mor than have to have an embarrassing conversation!

Clearly there’s still a real information deficit to fill around SRH and early marriage in Bangladesh. Yet our adolescent listeners told us that Dosh Unisher Mor was the only radio show out there exclusively focused on SRH. This shouldn’t be the case. Shows like Dosh Unisher Mor have so much to offer young people and there should be more programmes out there like it.

is a development professional with a background in qualitative research, specifically in the areas of public health and communication.

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This past March, . Media reports led with death tolls and declarations of states of emergency. People and offered refuge in their homes to those seeking shelter on .

News coverage builds awareness of crises, drums up donations and connects the needy with people who can help.  But are we leveraging the full potential of media and communication to stop disasters happening in the first place?

I’d argue that we could save more lives and livelihoods by going to greater lengths to communicate with people at risk before rather than after disaster strikes. The forewarned are forearmed after all; they can reinforce their homes, stock up on supplies and get to safer places.

In recognition of how preparations can save lives, early warning systems – across multiple types of hazards – will be a key feature of the upcoming . Organised by the Mexican government and my organisation, the , the conference will take place in Cancún, Mexico from May 22nd to 26th. 

Recent years have seen some impressive improvements in the equipment used to detect pending disasters: weather satellites, flood water gauges and thermometers to measure sea surface temperatures. And technological advances in communication mean it’s easier to alert people than ever before.

But all these technical advancements count for little if they’re not backed up by money. But given the pressure on both governments and the public to focus on immediately pressing demands, convincing them to invest limited funds in preparing for disasters won’t be easy. Meeting this challenge will require convincing them of how costly disasters can be, as well as the risk of their happening – not easy cases to make.

These advancements also won’t amount to much if they don’t spur populations-at-large to break with their routines and get ready for serious events to strike. Bangladesh, India and the are just some of the countries taking this point increasingly seriously. Through working to improve public understanding of storm risks, they’ve helped ensure that weather forecasts lead to timely and efficient evacuations, with millions moved to safe areas, resulting in far fewer casualties.

Fortunately, these kinds of successes are replicable. Here are three ways of communicating to lay the groundwork for warning people about disasters before they happen:

1. Be engaging

Disaster risk reduction can come across as a daunting subject, with ordinary people switching off when they hear an acronym like DRR discussed in a dry, academic or alarmist way. But in an age of information overload, we need to entertain and engage people while helping them make decisions about how to prepare for disasters. 

For example, wouldn’t leave their pets behind during an evacuation – even if they only had five minutes – potentially endangering themselves and others. Clearly, people really love their dogs and cats.

Showcasing the effectiveness of engaging people with DRR through the issues they care about, off the back of this research which encouraged people to have emergency plans for the whole family – including their pets.

In the long run, making DRR content engaging will increase people’s confidence and motivation to: reduce risks, prepare for an emergency and respond when things start to get serious.

2. Respect that people have many pressing concerns

Poor people in low-income countries often juggle pressing priorities and have only limited options open to them. They‘re often forced to live in unsafe areas – like flood plains, unstable hillsides, and exposed coastlines – because there’s nowhere else they can afford to go. To take just one example, many of live alongside waterways, where they’re especially vulnerable when typhoons strike.

Economic pressures often force people to make decisions to ensure their immediate survival at the possible expense of their livelihoods ten years down the line. A recent was likely made more ruinous by deforestation fuelled by the search for arable land.

To successfully develop a culture of preparedness in everyday life, about what’s immediately important to them and present realistic ways of reducing the risks they face. 

3. Build understanding and trust

One of the strongest storms to ever make landfall, Typhoon Haiyan claimed well . Through conducting interviews in the storm’s aftermath, about how Haiyan would unfold.  

We discovered that many poor migrants and fishermen died in their shacks because they thought that evacuation meant eviction. Others mistakenly thought that their concrete homes were secure enough to withstand the storm.

Jerry Yoakasin, Vice Mayor of Tacloban, the worst-affected city in the country, has said that people didn’t understand what a ‘storm surge’ was. Defined as a sudden and abnormal rise in sea water levels, Haiyan's storm surge swept ships at sea inland, where they crushed homes.

Yoakasin believes lives were lost because storm surges weren't explained to people in ways they understood by those they trusted. His advice is just as relevant now.

The media can play an important role in breaking down complex issues for their audiences. This can drive public understanding of things like weather forecasting, helping shore up trust in early warning alerts. Closer relationships between the media, experts and government officials are essential to take full advantage of this potential.

Across all of these three areas – facilitating engagement, reflecting the difficult realities of people’s lives and building trust – media and communication have a vital role to play. When communication about disasters is attention-grabbing and relates to people’s experiences, people will actually sit up, take notice and prepare for hazards coming their way.

is Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and is head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). He tweets as .

The conference will take place in Cancún, Mexico from May 22^nd to 26^th.

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Duncan Green, Senior Strategic Advisor for Oxfam GB, shares his key takeaways from our Governance and Accountability event.

This blog was originally posted on Oxfam's . 

A recurring pattern: I get invited to join a conversation with a bunch of specialists on a particular issue (eg ). Cue panic and some quick skim-reading of background papers, driven by the familiar fear of finally being exposed as a total fraud (some of us spend all our lives waiting for the tap on the shoulder). Then a really interesting conversation. Relief!

Last week it was the role of the media in governance,  at the Â鶹ԼÅÄ, organized by the excellent , the Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s international development charity. Recording .

What emerged was a picture of increasing churn and fragmentation – a media and information ecosystem that is casting off vestiges of linearity (a few big newspapers and one or two big TV and radio stations) and becoming far more complex (social media, online, local radio, ever more channels of everything).

In response, just as with governance and markets, those trying to promote change and development are starting to think in terms of systems rather than linear theories of change. It’s no longer good enough (if it ever was) to look for the lever to pull to trigger change (a new law, an article in the FT). Instead, just as with governance, there is a twin track emerging:

Enabling environment: Broad brush support through legislation (right to information, media independence, protecting sources), access (spread of 4G, literacy) is a role for outsiders that doesn’t require them to fathom the complexity of local media systems.

However, the consensus in the room was that this is not enough – echoes of the Twaweza debate a few years back, where they found that the theory of change ‘giving people access to information → social and political action’ failed because they hadn’t thought about the assumptions behind the arrow.

So what else is needed? An  by Â鶹ԼÅÄ Media Action of a massive 6 year, DFID-funded project on using media to increase accountability by inspiring political participation (it reached >190m people in 12 countries) provided some interesting clues (full evaluation ):

• Enabling discussions and brokering relationships, not just providing information (seems like we’re learning from the experiences of Twaweza)
• The centrality of local context – eg some societies and cultures (and political systems) like confrontational media formats, while others prefer collaboration. The implication for funders is the importance of local staff and local partnerships – outsiders are never going to understand the system
• Critical Junctures (eg elections, natural disasters or protest movements) provide the natural rhythm for engaging both with media and politics

An associated  claims ‘audiences participate more in politics than people who do not listen to and/or
watch its programmes, even when taking other influencing factors – such as age, income and interest in politics – into account’. Not sure whether that is attribution  or association (eg what if a third factor, like church or other organizational membership or family background, leads people both to watch socially aware programmes and take part in political action?) but will leave that to the evaluation geeks.

Digging into the numbers a bit further, the evaluation also found a mixed picture on the equity impact of its media work: larger increases in participation were seen in groups that traditionally participate less, but on the other hand, the increase in participation was greater among men than among women (presumably because of other constraints on mobility, time etc).

How can community engagement be used to promote young people’s sexual and reproductive health in conservative countries? Two education programmes in Pakistan offer some answers. 

Around the world, there is deep-seated discomfort about adolescent sexuality outside of marriage. Many don’t accept that teenagers have sex; those that do typically see it as a problem only made worse by sexuality education. As a result, policymakers are reticent, school heads and teachers are uncomfortable and community groups are often opposed to sexuality education, paralysing action in many countries.

There are consequently to educate young people about sexual and reproductive health in an age-appropriate and context-specific way. Yet a small number of organisations, including and in Pakistan – an indigenous and Dutch organisation, respectively – are coming to understand and navigate these obstacles, by learning through their own experience of engaging with communities.

Adapting to Pakistani society and culture

Recognising societal and cultural barriers to sexuality education, both Aahung and Rutgers WPF adapted World Health Organization guidelines for life skills-based education (LSBE) to the local context in Pakistan. LSBE aims to inform students about health while equipping them with skills to better manage their own lives and make healthier decisions.

Before engaging with stakeholders, Aahung carried out a power mapping exercise to identify influential community members. It then organised a series of communication-focused activities, such as learning forums and in-person meetings, to gain support from local religious groups and school associations up to the Department of Education.

Having consulted with these communities, Aahung recognised it would be culturally inappropriate to directly address sensitive topics like pre-marital sexual activity by talking about contraceptives. Instead, the organisation targets related problems – including child marriage and gender-based violence – identified as problems by local actors themselves.  

In this way, Aahung simultaneously serves these community interests while adhering to internationally established recommendations by focusing on common intermediate outcomes, such as comfort with one’s own body, communication skills, confidence and decision-making abilities.

Successfully reaching adolescents also requires embracing those in their immediate circles of influence. Realising this, Aahung supports the sensitisation and counselling of parents and the wider community by school administrators and teachers. To increase transparency, Aahung held public theatre performances and discussion sessions to demystify LSBE and win people over to its way of working. Rutgers WPF created a Parents Involvement Strategy in 2011 in pursuit of this same goal. 

Engaging media to prevent and respond to backlash

Media can be both a friend and foe to sexuality education efforts, as both organisations have seen.

In 2011 and 2012, conservative media outlets linked to a religious political party, Jamat-ul-Islami, criticised Rutgers WPF for ‘breaking the moral fabric of Pakistan’ and corrupting the minds of pupils. Following parliamentary discussions, the organisation’s work was stopped in Punjab and it was advised to get the content vetted by religious scholars in Sindh.

In response, Rutgers WPF reached out to a small group of respected and well-known journalists from print, radio and television to help facilitate a dialogue with mass media personnel in the affected provinces. This stimulated public discussion of how LSBE could address the vulnerabilities of adolescents.

Additionally, school visits demonstrated to media personnel how the programme increased the confidence and performance of students and teachers. They saw for themselves that the accusations about Rutgers WPF (e.g. that it was teaching 11-year-old children how to have sex) were false. The participating journalists went on to produce a number of stories about what they learned.  

Rutgers WPF also arranged for progressive religious scholars to review the content of its LBSE curriculum and supplement its content with messages from the Koran. This work fed into a series of meetings with parliamentarians, policy makers, religious scholars and media personnel that culminated in permission to resume LSBE in schools in Sindh.

While Aahung also underwent a similar review, it decided against including religious content in the curriculum. Instead, it used a human rights-based approach to bring legitimacy to its work, demonstrating that different approaches to sexuality education can be successful in the same context.  

Aahung and Rutgers WFP recognise that it’s not enough to run effective education programmes if they aren’t accepted locally and by society-at-large. Both organisations know they must be ready to respond to occasional backlash (often coordinated) from media, religious institutions and other groups. Yet they also value the media as an ally in preventing and responding to this same backlash. A two-pronged approach, whereby these organisations reach out to local communities while simultaneously working with the media, secures both organisations’ local support as well as a network of journalists ready to champion their cause in the face of heated opposition.

For further information, read the case study summaries of and .

For additional detail on LSBE in Pakistan, read this .

Dr Venkatraman Chandra-Mouli works on Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) in the World Health Organization’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research. With over 25 years of experience, he focuses on building the evidence base on ASRH, and supporting countries to translate this evidence into action.

Marina Plesons is a public health student interning with Dr Chandra-Mouli; she is also the co-founder of .

This blog was developed with input from Sheena Hadi, Executive Director of Aahung, and Qadeer Baig, Pakistan Country Representative for Rutgers WPF.

Marking International Day for Disaster Reduction, Marcus Oxley argues that we need more media coverage of disasters before – rather than after – they happen. This would make prevention more of a priority, allowing more people to ‘live to tell’.

After big disasters, the world responds with compassion for the victims and the humanitarian assistance machine kicks into gear. National and local governments respond with rescue operations. Other countries offer assistance. International NGOs deploy personnel and provide shelter, food and basic health services. Local and international media show images of the destruction and share victims’ appeals for support with the world. The international public responds with donations to alleviate the suffering of their fellow human beings.

And that is the way it should be. As human beings, it is our duty to do everything in our power to help with rescuing and treating the injured, and support efforts to bring communities back to normality. However, there is a flaw with this system of responding to disasters.

Ensuring more people ‘live to tell’

Nothing can be done – not by governments, institutions, civil society, communities or the media – to bring back the dead. “Everything can be rebuilt, but lives cannot be recovered, and that's what hurts the most." said Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, after the April 2016 earthquake killed 661 people in his country.

With the devastating effects of Hurricane Matthew still fresh in our minds, we mark on October 13th. This year, the theme is ‘Live to Tell’, to raise awareness of the need to curb the amount of lives lost by disasters, big and small.

Extreme weather events, like droughts and cyclones, as they used to be but mortality rates still aren’t going down fast enough. Plus the death rate for earthquakes is actually rising due to the high number of vulnerable communities living in unplanned urban settlements.

In 2015, in Sendai, Japan, that disasters need to be made less deadly. But how? The answer is investing in and raising the profile of disaster prevention.

The media should be active before, not just after, a disaster hits

We all have a role to play in promoting prevention, including the media. How many times have you read a newspaper op-ed that asks: ‘What could have been done to prevent this catastrophe?’ Often asked rhetorically, this question is rarely answered by the author though it certainly should be. There is always a lot that could’ve been done and the answers are well-known locally by disaster-hit communities, civil society and government.

But here’s the catch. Prevention work isn’t an appealing topic for the public and so is understandably largely ignored by the media. Early warning systems, community preparedness, participatory budgeting, local government by-laws all sound as boring as watching paint dry. So I cannot blame the media for not making disaster prevention the biggest TV hit since ‘The Great British Bake Off’.

However, the local and international press can be powerful agents of change, through raising the profile of prevention by asking more incisive questions. Were effective early warning systems in place? Why were people’s homes built there in the first place? Were communities sufficiently prepared? Are government’s policies on disaster prevention adequate? Is local government preparedness properly funded? In short, journalists should be asking themselves: who is responsible for this disaster?

Speaking more broadly, the media can investigate root causes, raise the alarm about failings, interrogate inefficient policies and denounce corruption, negligence, malpractice and the lack of enforcement of regulations. This is what they should be doing not only after but also – most importantly – before the next extreme event strikes.

Working more closely with local media and NGOs

In addition to their , local media in particular can create public thirst for disaster prevention, for involving vulnerable communities in developing better policies and for demanding resources for local governments. Local media can also partner with civil society organisations to: discover and report on prevention work already being done, run national advocacy campaigns and hold politicians to account.

It is a challenging task but the rewards are worth it – saving lives when disasters strike. And the media does not need to go it alone; it has a valuable ally in civil society, especially in local NGOs.

While international NGOs will be on-the-ground and ready to talk to the media about rescue and relief operations, they’ve often just arrived (just like reporters) and so usually know little about the communities affected.

Local NGOs, on the other hand, are usually the first to respond after the communities themselves. They can serve as some of the media’s best sources of information about why there’s been devastation and what could have been done to prevent it. Local NGOs typically know communities well and have often assessed the most vulnerable areas and groups of the population. Partners like my organisation, the , can help the media to identify and contact these local NGOs and other key local actors that can lead positive change.

Think again about reports of Hurricane Matthew’s impact on Haiti and the USA. More than 500 people died in one country, 22 in the other. It’s not random that one hurricane led to such different outcomes in the two countries. Investment of time, money and energy in prevention is what will shrink this disparity, making the difference between life and death. Journalists have a crucial role in raising the profile of disaster prevention, so more people can live to tell.

is the Executive Director and co-founder of the (GNDR).