Save the Children is continuously strengthening and expanding its emergency preparedness and risk reduction capabilities within our Headquarters, Country Offices, partner communities, and even among children.

Children at an IDP camp in Indonesia 2007.

Children:
Save the Children empowers children to be involved in community preparedness and mitigation plans. Through child participation, community preparedness plans benefit from the unique perspective of children, and children benefit from the opportunity to learn about emergency preparedness and risk reduction, which provides them with a greater sense of security and capacity to cope should a disaster occur. Learn more about how Save the Children emergency preparedness work empowers children.

Communities:
In disaster-prone countries, the agency works with partners including governments, community groups, and local institutions, such as schools, to build indigenous capacity to respond to emergencies. The agency supports the development of community-based preparedness plans which are used to establish critical mechanisms such as early warning systems and pre-identified evacuation centers. Through trainings and educational activities, community leaders, families, and children learn about what they can do to stay safe and assist others during a disaster. Save the Children also helps communities to reduce the impact of emergencies before they occur by conducting risk assessments and identifying ways to reduce a communities' vulnerability to disaster such as planting trees in areas prone to landslides or installing drainage systems in areas prone to flooding.

The Save the Children response team distributes family packs to cyclone survivors in Bangladesh. Save the Children / Rudolph von Bernuth

Country Offices:
Save the Children works at the country level to strengthen the Country Offices' ability to provide efficient and effective emergency response by developing country-specific preparedness plans, training of local staff and establishing response mechanisms. One of the key response mechanisms is propositioned stockpiles of locally appropriate relief items that can be immediately deployed during an emergency. These items include water purification tablets, blankets and shelter materials, among other things.

Headquarters:
Preparedness planning is at the core of our emergency work. To ensure readiness at the agency level, all of the departments within Save the Children's headquarters have developed emergency preparedness plans based on thorough analysis and experience. Plans include essential information and outline critical steps on how to respond to and reduce the impact of emergencies in all programmatic areas including health, education, protection, and livelihoods.

Read more about the ways in which building resiliency and response capacity have saved lives in past emergencies including Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh and the 2006 flooding in Indonesia.

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Read more about Save the Children's Emergency Preparedness