Bangladesh

Community involvement is crucial to the success of disaster relief and preparedness programs in Bangladesh, an aid official with years of experience working in the South Asian country has noted.

“Communities have been living with disasters for much longer than we have been talking about disaster risk reduction,” said Dilruba Haider, a director of Bangladesh Disaster Preparedness Center, a non-governmental organization, told IRIN. “Unless you involve communities and give them the feeling that this is their project, as soon as you withdraw, the whole thing collapses.”