Cultural sensitivity is essential to effective disaster management and disaster risk reduction, yet disaster plans still largely view those affected as victims and as a homogenous group, within which children are often invisible.
Understanding children’s perspectives has been demonstrated by organisations such as Save the Children, to be a vital part of the process of building resilience: children are community members and citizens in their own right with potential to play an important role in shaping more effective responses to disaster at local and national levels.
Children are excellent disseminators of information and have the potential to be a catalyst for positive change within their communities and can actively participate in disaster risk reduction activities. Furthermore, as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states, children have the right to have their opinion taken into account on any matter that affects them and this includes disasters.
The combination of rising urbanisation, increasing climate-change related risk, the particular vulnerabilities of children and young people and the lack of awareness of their perceptions, priorities and capacities, has prompted us to develop the CUIDAR project. We argue that if urban societies are to become resilient to this increasing problem, then children and young people’s voices must be heard and understood throughout disaster preparedness, response and recovery.
CUIDAR has seven objectives:
1. To understand what assumptions are made about children and young people (as a diverse cultural group) in current disaster risk reduction and resilience building programmes, policies and practices for urban contexts, specifically:
• To what degree do children and young people participate in disaster management?
• Do policies and practices take a range of cultural perspectives into account? For example, cultures of disability, social class, disadvantage, gender, ethnicity, marginalisation.
• How are these cultures perceived as: a) strengths or b) vulnerabilities?
2. To consult and partner with children in high-risk urban contexts to understand their perception of risk and share ideas about ways they could increase their resilience; together to explore ways to communicate their experience and priorities to their peers, communities, policy makers and practitioners.
3. To engage in and develop more effective lines of communication with children and young people to enable them to influence local/regional disaster management strategy, empowering children to realise their right to be heard.
4. To use the above to enable practitioners and policy makers to gain understanding and insight into children’s risk perceptions, priorities and their capacities in urban contexts, taking into account different cultural groups.
5. Through regional, national and EU level policy dialogues raise awareness and communicate issues related to children and young people’s resilience and perception of risk, how this is impacted by cultural factors and how policy needs to develop to include this.
6. To develop a disaster management policy and practice framework for engaging with children and young people’s perspectives, recognising their capacities, and taking account of their different cultural strengths and vulnerabilities.
7. To carry out an effective dissemination programme with children’s participation, specifically:
• To disseminate outcomes to relevant national civil protection, voluntary and children’s organisations via conference presentations and articles in popular, government and third sector publications and the media.
• To ensure publication of project results in high quality journals (in all project languages).
• To disseminate outcomes globally via social media, oral, poster and virtual presentations at leading international conferences and workshops.
