Lesson Learned: For Participation of Persons with Disabilities in Disaster and Climate Risk Governance in the Philippines
There should be a more nuanced, context-specific approach to empowering the Organizations of Persons with Disabilities. In the present project, some Organizations of Persons with Disabilities were more organizationally mature, with empowered leaders. This variation, especially regarding organizational maturity, should have been better captured in the rapid appraisal conducted at the onset of the project, enabling a more efficient organizational capacitation plan for each organization.
This project works to empower people with disabilities to participate in disaster risk reduction approaches in 20 local government units in Cebu Province. It will build capacity for 20 organizations of persons with disabilities to have a real voice in formal community planning processes, with the goal of influencing local government to break barriers, open spaces for inclusion, and encourage at-risk populations to take an active role in disaster preparedness, risk reduction and other community development agenda issues.